Louder Than Ten is the project management and operations training consultancy I helped co-found. In September 2023, we officially converted to a worker-owned cooperative. This new milestone, fresh direction, and radical new business model commanded a new identity. Our fresh brand needed to be bold, scalable, and connect to our target audience: owners of creative and digital agencies.

Most agencies are caught in an endless cycle of cramming projects through the door to make up for lost margins, and it's burning out their staff, upsetting their clients, and resulting in more late, over-budget, and unoriginal work. Louder Than Ten training breaks the cycle and provides your team with the skills, systems, and space to plan and execute innovative, creative work that attracts your best clients, with a project experience that keeps them coming back.

Brand strategy

Louder Than Ten’s conversion to a worker-owned cooperative means that all current and future employees can become owners with an equal vote on company policies, a share of profits, and equity. Additionally, the focus has transitioned from training individuals to training entire digital teams and agencies. While the trade name remains the same, the company now operates under a new cooperative corporation with a refreshed energy. This calls for a bold new identity that retains enough familiarity and brand equity for our community, clients, and audience to recognize that it is the same people but signals that it is entering a new chapter.

Under the old identity, we developed a massive library of illustrations and resources. Being a small team, we needed our new identity to be compatible with our existing assets so that we wouldn't have to completely overhaul our website, marketing materials, and educational intellectual property. The new brand draws inspiration from the legacy identity but simplifies the colour usage, updates the typography, and evolves our line-based illustration framework. The result is a new, fresh look that is familiar and economical.

Logo variations

Avatars

Design system

When everything is loud, nothing is loud. Despite our name being Louder Than Ten, with our redesign, I wanted to be more intentional with the dynamics of our visual language and rein in some of our existing system's random and varied components. I reduced the colour usage, normalized the illustration styles, and simplified the typography in the default guts of the system, but then gave it the tools and flexibility to knock things out of the park when we wanted to apply some art direction and expression. That contrast of having an understated, conservative base against our more intentional expressive elements makes those pieces feel even louder than they were before.

Thanks to our Live Wires system, it was trivial to update our website and learning management system with a few updates to some CSS variables and a few tweaks here and there to fine-tune the typography.

Colour

Even though our system had a limited colour palette, our old identity played with those shades a little haphazardly, which gave it an inconsistent tone that felt a little confused and disjointed in places. We reduced our usage to mainly consist of warm grays with the occasional pop of International Orange.

We still like to let our freak flags fly and amp up the art direction, especially in our Coax articles and other more expressive online pieces. I rebuilt our full palette with tones that lean towards the lighter and darker sides of the spectrum for more accessible theming, then put them together in a collection of curated themes that give us a balance of controlled expression that we can assign with a simple class or field setting in our CMS.

Primary colours

Secondary colours

Typography

Calibre was our workhorse typeface in our old identity. It's a great typeface that served us well, and I made a little nod to it by using it in our logo. But this time, I wanted to bring it closer to a traditional grotesque without using Helvetica's poorly drawn digital versions. Commercial Type's Neue Haas Grotesk is exceptionally crafted. It's not particularly creative, expressive, or loud, and that's exactly why I chose it. It gives me a simple, familiar, non-fussy typeface that doesn't draw much attention to itself for the base typography. To add a little drama, I added Commercial Type's Druk family, which has a massive collection of alternate widths specifically drawn to accompany Neue Haas Grotesk. I also want to give us the freedom to use additional fonts in our articles and more expressive pieces, and Neue Haas Grotesk is relatively easy to pair with.

Illustration

Over the years, I have developed a large illustration library for our marketing and educational materials. Most of them use a geometric lined aesthetic that has become a significant part of our visual language, and I wanted to preserve that (without redrawing hundreds of illustrations and visualizations). Additionally, I aimed to create a system for constructing illustrations more efficiently and consistently, making it simple for any new designers to do the same.

Illustration system

For this updated system, I needed a way to create illustrations quickly using our lined geometric motif. I created a library of drag-and-drop illustration components made from circles, squares, and triangles in three different line weights. With this system, we can efficiently generate intricate, stylized illustrations with a consistent look and feel unique to Louder Than Ten. Even our logo is created using this system.

Application