LeftBrain’s brand refresh: behind the scenes

LeftBrain has been equipping ambitious teams with wonderful workplace technology since 2009. Over the years we’ve grown organically through referrals, word of mouth and the odd Google ad. But since our clients have become more high-profile and our services more high-end, the time had come for us to align the quality of our brand with the quality of our work.

Ditching “IT” for workplace technology

So we got all introspective. What is it that makes us LeftBrain? How do we differentiate ourselves from the rest of the IT crowd? Well, for starters we hate the “IT” label and its connotations of bad suits, with bad hair, operating offices with rows and rows of boring grey boxes, doing equally boring work. After carrying out some friendly ‘competitor’ research, we came to realise that we had outgrown the IT industry and evolved into a workplace technology consultancy. To mark this shift, we chose to change our website domain from leftbrain.it to leftbrain.io.

Understanding our audience

We have a wide range of clients, from boutique creative agencies and aspirational tech start-ups through to large enterprises and brands. But one thing they all share is the desire to give their teams the absolute best. We wanted to ensure our brand was recognisable enough to build upon the sense of trust placed in LeftBrain by our current clients, but outstanding enough to capture the attention of likeminded new clients.

Our target audience may come to us for the delivery of a specific internal tech project or service, but we wanted to make sure the human support side of our business was always at the forefront of our brand. After all, our best feedback from clients has always been about our lovely team.

Defining who we are

LeftBrain is the anti-IT company. From this starting point, we came up with our mission: to give each member of your team a remarkable digital workplace experience. We wanted our tone of voice to be friendly, plainspoken and to the point, whilst still allowing our off-beat slightly nerdy personality to shine through.

Our values inform how we show up to the world, even when nobody’s watching. They define precisely how we operate, interact with our clients and achieve our mission. Throughout this brand refresh process, they have always remained the same:

• Get the basics right
• Build trust and respect
• Challenge the status quo
• Reduce friction
• And ultimately, make people happy

Gathering inspiration

We don’t mean to be rude, but a lot of IT companies seem to use stock imagery of people smiling behind computers, accompanied with clip art graphics and slogans like “first-class IT support” or “your trusted IT partner”. Given that ‘challenge the status quo’ is one of our values, we wanted to make sure our brand identity set us apart and had a distinctly LeftBrain look and feel.

We drew inspiration from a few random places, outside of the IT world. Our starting point was a vintage 'The ProWriter Cometh' poster promoting the 1982 dot matrix printer computer, which hung in our London office about eight years ago and now proudly hangs in our Copenhagen office.

There was something about the space age aesthetic from the advertising of the early eighties microcomputer revolution that resonated with us. It was an era that saw computers, previously taking up entire floors of big corporations and universities, suddenly become within reach of small businesses and homes. There was a feeling of excitement, awe, wonder (and a little bit of fear) about the endless possibilities that computing offered (something that we’re now seeing with AI). Marketing at the time used that space age, almost alien, aesthetic to reinforce that feeling – what computers might be able to do was so abstract and nebulous that the only way to represent it was to turn to the stars.

It was by turning to the stars ourselves that we came up with the slogan currently on our homepage: “All Systems Go”. Although subtle in our marketing, we often incorporate space-themed references as a metaphor for our team navigating the ever-evolving world of technology.  

In our research, we also came across the Turkish illustrator Princess Hıdır’s sci-fi inspired artwork. We loved her hyper-digital practice paired with the use of luminescent colours and unearthly settings. We wanted to capture this aesthetic in our brand, but do so in a way that still portrayed us as very, very human and at the cutting edge of technological development.

Getting creative

We went in search of creative minds and came across A-Side Studio, a tight-knit team of designers and illustrators in Cornwall, UK. They have an impressive portfolio of playful and dynamic campaigns, and offered us a creative way forward that ticked all the boxes.

We also wanted to capture the LeftBrain team at work and play, so commissioned photographer Jonathan Cherry whose passion lies in the practice of portraiture (and very much not IT stock imagery).

After several illustration iterations and some back and forth with the A-Side team, a brand manual was put together to outline who we are, what our brand assets look like, and how they should be used out in the wild. This includes logo options, fonts, illustrations and how we apply the brand across various platforms. They took our somewhat outlandish visual inspirations along with Jonathan’s photographs, and translated it into a usable toolkit of guidelines and assets.

We are particularly taken with A-Side’s illustrations, which have been peppered throughout the LeftBrain website. On our Services page you will find a visual representation of each of our capabilities: Strategy, Security, Support and Infrastructure. A-Side accompanied these illustrations with a rationale as to how the composition came about.

1. Strategy: The overall components or shapes combine to create a gentle structure alluding to the “beautifully simple” technology LeftBrain delivers.
2. Security: The dominating central shape at the core of this illustration represents the bespoke security architecture that LeftBrain create.
3. Support: The shapes come together and interact in a supportive organic way to create a human feel.
4. Infrastructure: This illustration has balance, with the dots and lines representing data flow all moving around a perfectly integrated infrastructure.

Putting the brand to good use

It’s all systems go! You’ll now find the brand refresh applied across our website, social channels, newsletters, proposals and more. We are proud of our new look, which is now aligned with the calibre of our clients and the quality of the services we deliver.

We asked A-Side how they found the brand refresh process:

"It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with LeftBrain. As challenging the status quo is at their core we knew we would be a good match from the beginning! For us, some of the best work comes through play and experimentation; LeftBrain gave us the trust and freedom to do this. In what is often a dull sector, our collaboration has allowed us to create a stand-out, approachable brand."