the first steps toward rebranding began with a paradigm shift in the service. the product was no longer just a community of professionals, it was an ecosystem of services to help find staff, locations, and knowledge.

each sub-product could be developed separately, as an independent story for a specific audience. to make this possible, we had to revise the positioning of the main product and its sub-products in the market, adjust to demographics, as well as update the corporate identity.

before we began our work, we set the following goals:

• review the positioning of the product in advertising communications;
• analyze user data;
• choose a brand headset;
• update the palette;
• redesign the logo;
• update social media;
• survey the audience regarding brand renewal;
• update the SMM manual and brandbook

the concept of the relationship between performers and customers was based on castings, so all subsequent modules had a direct or indirect connection with them and were their sub-products.

for scaling purposes, we decided to describe formal categories. these were: ads, services, people, and training.

by turning to geographic and demographic data, we found that 95% of the traffic comes from Russia, and the audience is in the age group of 25 to 34. these results influenced the transition to cyrillic and a less saturated palette.

choosing a headset took us more than 50% of the total task. we were looking for a font that reads well on different devices and in different sizes.

we tested about 300 popular fonts for uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and unicode. the top five were adapted for interfaces to assess their viability. the finalists were compared in volumetric typing and logo visualisation.

this is how we came to the neo-grotesque hauss developed by Artemy Lebedev Studio.

we assembled the main palette from the blue, black, and white we already had. it was these colours that characterised and distinguished our product among competitors. additional colors for the categories we selected taking into account their purposes, namely highlighting errors, explanations and warnings.

translucent tones we formed from the main and additional color groups to highlight information.

we built the base colours for the light and dark themes by grading transparency and testing them for contrast by adapting to interfaces and resorting to wcag 2.0.

we did not use semantic color names for the brand, so that when we update the design system we have more flexibility in changing color schemes.

in the new logo, we decided to abandon the captions and icons, which visually overloaded the sign, leaving only the text. we decided to use lowercase letters in bold because of their optimal weight.

in addition, we have introduced regional restrictions for interaction with the service and its communications in cyrillic or latin.

additionally, we have developed composite constructs that include the name of the service and sub-product to work with a specific sub-brand.

in addition to the text mark, we updated the graphic mark, which was to be used in a limited space: in the favicon of the site, as an application icon and an avatar in social networks.

the final stage consisted in the collection of brand guidelines and updating the smm guidelines, which can be found by clicking on the links.

having updated social networks to the new style, we decided to make a presentation and conduct a survey of users. more than 80% of respondents responded positively, expecting a soon update of the service.