1MD was engaged by Lightspeed Research to create a styleguide for an existing logo. The styleguide would define the direction for the new My Survey website. 1MD developed a brand direction to support the existing logo, which resulted in a comprehensive styleguide.

A huge mistake many businesses make is creating a logo. It is not as simple as paying a designer for a couple of concepts and WHAM there it is. there is alot to go into the creation, colours, targets, emotions needed or portrayed, fonts, fontweights and space around the logo. After such considerations the next step is to place the logo in potential environments and formats to evaluate how it presents. A logo is not a brand. Without defining what a brand is and how it will be incorporated across your business and collateral, a logo can be isolated and irrelevant.

For My Survey we needed to create a brand direction from the ground up. First we looked at the supplied logo. It lacked a sense of depth, so we added a slight gradient to the green. Next we added a floor shadow to make the logo seem to be floating. Traditonal designers would have baulked about shadows printing badly, however this brand lives online. We also created a print friendly version in the styleguide.

Once the logo was tweaked we started considering different formats and how the logo would sit in relevance, resulting in a concept board with examples - emails, banners, website pages, and a mood board for imagery direction. We took our time creating the spatial relationship of the logo within the different formats. Specifically in online media formats it is often difficult to create consistent logo spacing, as the formats have inconsistent dimensions. Our method is to create a 300x250 island banner and a 728x90 leaderboard, which enables us to configure the logo positioning for both horizontal and vertical formats.

Lightspeed Research loved the initial direction and our thought process. Once signed off we quickly moved into designing the new My Survey Australia Site, and creating an animation direction for online media campaigns.

The requirement for the My Survey Australia Site was to design the page templates and assist with integrating the new design into their existing platform. Initially we presented wireframes to propose the new site architecture. The wireframes addressed usability issues and defined content types. From here we moved into developing page templates that fit into their existing framework and delivered the new brand direction.

For the online media campaigns we created an animation style. In this case, the animation style would present the emotional flow of the messaging consistently. The style was also applied to the Flash elements within their Homepage.

In addition we created a range of brand icons for Survey Templates, eDM's, generic site ads/promos.

Our last project task was to create a comprehensive styleguide. The styleguide included logo variations, brand rules, fonts, page templates & imagery examples.

The new My Survey site launched in Australian in [insert date]. The online launch campaign generated great clickthrough and conversion rates. Existing members loved the new site, its features, and its accessibility. A number of Inactive members reactivated their accounts to take part in the new site. The new My Survey site was migrated globally without any issues.

Based on our working process and the project results1MD received the following 4 online media campaigns. We are currently working with My Survey to define their online strategy for the next 12 months. A great result for everyone.

"1MD was originally commissioned by Lightspeed to create a styleguide for the new My Survey website from an existing brand. The outcome was professional and well received not only locally but globally and from this 1MD was asked to update the Style guide for the European sites. The excellent work meant that the first 3 digital marketing campaigns on the new site were commissioned with 1MD and all have performed above targets. From a client point of view Craig and Claire are professional and a pleasure to have working for you".

Charlie Winn - Director of Panel Operations.

Lightspeed Research
November 22, 2010