Mailchimp has launched a fully redesigned brand identity and design system today to better support its customers as its business and services evolve into a full-service marketing platform. The new brand identity will be woven throughout the entire Mailchimp experience.
Mailchimp invited COLLINS to help design the brand's fundamental business transformation. COLLINS helped Mailchimp to clarify its brand and identity system by elevating the core characteristic of its brand: unconventionality.
The resulting design system, expertly expressed by the Mailchimp design team and its creative agency R/GA, evolves the whimsy that distinguished Mailchimp early-on into more purposeful, playful surrealism. The evolution retains the elements that endeared the brand to its first fervent fans while creating space for the brand to grow and speak with greater authority to new and wider audiences.
COLLINS' work entailed: Updating Freddie, Mailchimp's beloved mascot; replacing the previous script logotype with a new, chunky, slightly off-kilter wordmark that's designed to better connect with a more simplified Freddie; introducing a new brand typeface, Cooper Light, based on the historically beloved typeface Cooper Black; and creating a new illustration style that favors personal expression over realistic accuracy, nodding to Mailchimp's support for businesses looking to build their brands by maintaining their unique voices in the world.
Images: courtesy of COLLINS