In the last few months, we’ve been working with an ESG investment company to fully rebrand their business. This is a company with serious ambitions to change how investing works around the world by encouraging investment in socially responsible entities, so it’s on us to make them look the part.
And so, to make sure we left no stone unturned in achieving this, we explored a number of concepts throughout the process, and Maida is one of them (spoiler alert: it didn’t become the final brand identity).
The whole project started with finding a new name, and we ended up working through 50+ options with Maida Investing being one of our favourites. As an investment company that uses incredibly advanced AI to inform investment decisions, technology is at the heart of who this company is (and ideally, the client wanted to keep an element of “AI” in the name).
So, we wanted to find a name that meaningfully integrated tech, and that had a story behind it. Depth and purpose, as always, were key.
We looked into historical figures in the world of computing, and who better to look at than the father of AI itself, Alan Turing. We looked into his life, and it turns out he was born in a place called Maida Vale in the UK.
So, “Maida Investing”…A name with a story, with substance, with relevance. And what was even better is that right there in the name, it said “AI Investing”. Beauty.
With a great name chosen, the next step in creating this concept was to build a visual identity to match. The experience that our client wants to provide with their service is a sophisticated one - a ‘white-glove’ investment platform for an audience of finance professionals.
So, we needed an identity to convey a tech-oriented company that provides a sophisticated product.
As we mentioned before, we chose a name that had “AI Investing” hidden inside it. The first thing was to emphasise this tech aspect, and the AI aspect of the service, by simply italicising these letters in the name. This put technology at the centre of the identity, without being too obvious with the “AI” part.
Our choice of typeface was crucial here, and we opted for Studio Pro as the only type for this brand identity. It leant itself perfectly to the subtle nod to AI that we needed in the logo.
Further, given the extensive data and dense information communicated by the company, we needed a typeface that could handle these details. This type family has a large x-height which makes it ideal for small-size reading, while maintaining elegance when needing to communicate more boldly.
For the colours, we were looking for a flexible and versatile palette that could accommodate other brands (for example when compiling investment reports on other businesses) as well as communicate confidently on its own behalf (with that sophisticated, white-glove appeal). Focused on a rich typographic and image-based approach, we elected for a simple colour set of black, white, and grey.
To capture themes around ESG, the image direction for the Maida brand identity focused on ideas of sustainability and a better world. We wanted the imagery to reference beautiful and vast depictions of nature.
At the same time, it also needed to be relevant to the data/tech angle to the business. Considering that the data that Maida uses reflects something real, we opted for images that could represent both the data and the real world, and draw a connection between them.
For example, in the above image, the sunlight is dancing on the water, like finding glimmers of valuable data in a sea of information (like Maida does with their investment platform). The imagery, then, represents the connection between the real world and investing decisions. We liked that idea that, as much as investors are looking for growth, seeing the underpinning information as being more than just a number reflects the mission of ESG and Maida Investing.
And so, through this careful process, the concept for Maida captured sophistication while always emphasising the forward-looking, technological heart of the brand.
See more of our work at: fookcommunications.com
