Unveiling the New Skai: Part 2 – The Need

Note: This is the 2nd post in a 5-part series tracing the steps we went through to redesign the Skai logo, a step forward toward our new brand launch on the 10th of February. You can read part 1 here.

We’ve worn the Skai logo that you’ve come to recognize for a good six years now, and it has served us well. It reflected who we were for quite some time, and fit an aesthetic reflective of the nature of Skai’s infancy onto early adolescence.

Square and solid, this logo screams tech, and, well, we are a tech company. It announces our name in all caps, which, early on, felt important as we busied ourselves with making that name mean something, vying to be heard in a highly saturated industry. It has an arrow that pointed up and to the right, the area of the chart where we all want to play, and there’s some negative space happening that seemed to indicate there was so much more to come.

There was, and is, so much more to come for Skai. In the past few years, together with our clients, we’ve deftly navigated the twists and turns in the digital marketing road with creativity and courage. Bolstered by an unwavering and uncomplicated commitment to our clients’ growth, we’ve charted new territory, and innovated with an artistry not typically associated with our space. Our niche is incredibly sophisticated marketers, and they’ve inspired us to build premium marketing tools sophisticated enough to serve their needs.

In other words, we grew, and we grew up. Our “outfit” no longer fit, no longer said enough, or more accurately, the right things. We found that the stiff blockiness of our logo’s typeface and icon began to feel rooted and wrong—contrary to the light-on-our-feet agility that’s allowed us to push the envelope so.

The all-caps treatment seemed unnecessarily shouty, when in reality, our senior leadership is comprised of humble and understated geniuses people. The arrow put too much focus on the small picture, the charts and numbers, which, while undeniably important, are only a piece of the more strategic, future-focused partnerships we enjoy.

For months, we’d been exploring new territory with our marketing and creative, making public our brand promise of Infinite Optimization^TM and getting more artistic with our visuals. By the time our first global client summit, K8, came to an inspiring close last September, it become clear that a new logo was the natural next step.

Then, Aaron, our CMO, caught a glimpse of the word “Kenshoo” casually doodled on the side of our CEO’s notebook. The ridged surface of the stack of pages caused a natural ripple effect in Yoav’s scrawl, unintentionally loaning the letters a sense of movement they’d been missing for some time.

It was a sign that change was afoot. We set early 2014 as our target, and got to work.

Tomorrow, I’ll share our initial brainstorm.