Saffron, the brand consultancy founded by Jacob Benbunan and Wally Olins in 2001, is celebrating its 15th-anniversary by evolving its offering as a consultancy, incorporating new key members to the team, and setting up shop in Berlin and San Francisco.
To help signal this new stage for the company, Saffron has launched a new visual identity and website.
“Our [Saffron's] identity has evolved in accordance with our new spirit," said Saffron's Executive Creative Director, Gabor Schreier. "We were born as a company with a strong consulting component, with a formal, serious posture/attitude and an equally plain and discrete identity, but we have evolved into a much more creative, disruptive, innovative and digital consulting company and we want to reflect all of this in our new image.”
To better reflect this new shift, Saffron created a whole set of visual elements that will help enrich and unify all of the company's communications.
The first key element is typography. Besides giving the company personality, a bespoke family has been developed to symbolize the combination of strategy and design -- a fundamental in any brand definition process, according to Saffron.
The new typographic family has four variants that illustrate this combination and, at the same time, represent the different phases of a project. The first variant speaks of the strategic part of the project - the soul - and is represented by a light typeface. The second relates to the outermost or visual - the skin - and is represented by a double contour. Combined, they form a third variant with three lines that symbolize the coming together of these two. A fourth and solid version completes the family.
The logo is updated in line with this new spirit. It eliminates the formality of serifs and bets for a simple wordmark composed with the new typography. A new monogram is introduced, playing with Saffron’s double F.
Saffron's main color remains yellow, yet it's now toned down a bit. For the new identity, the color palette is expanded with blue, green, orange and pink pastel tones, which allow for richer compositions. These pastel tones let black stand out in any composition, capitalizing on it and making it the foundation of the entire visual system.
To complete the elements, Saffron presents a new, very conceptual illustration system drawn from an isometric perspective. This system will be in motion most of the time, generating a dynamic and digital visual universe.
Overall, these tools will allow Saffron to deploy a simple and coherent language to easily explain abstract concepts, such as the brand definition process, to their clients.