Since we last updated our brand and website in 2014, we’ve grown a lot. We’ve added team members, capabilities, and processes. We’ve grown from a UX design firm into a customer experience research, strategy and design agency that spends almost as much time running innovation training programs inside Fortune 500 companies as we spend practicing what we preach.
Last summer, we got to talking about our website. We concluded that while it did a great job of reflecting who we were in 2014, it didn’t reflect the company we have grown into.
Some of our team members said the website looked like it was built in 2008, which wasn’t very fair, because this was our actual website in 2008:
The conversation about our website evolved, as such conversations nearly always do, into a conversation about our identity. In 2008, the name Tangible UX made a lot of sense. It even made sense in 2014, when we launched the last iteration of our website. But while we got our start building great products, we realized a long time ago that we could more effectively serve our clients by working on the entire customer experience from end to end. To that end, we toyed with the idea of spinning the “U” around to become “Tangible CX”.
But finally, we noticed that no one, either inside or outside the agency, called us “Tangible UX.” It was always just “Tangible.” And so we decided that for our new brand to truly align with who we are, and who our clients know us to be, we would drop the UX and just move forward as Tangible. It’s who we’ve been all along anyway.
The rebrand
We started by taking an honest look at our current logo.
And while we knew that we chose the name Tangible UX because we wanted to solve real business problems with practical, human-centric solutions, we took a step back and thought a lot about what the name Tangible means to us and to our clients.
We decided that at our core, we are human-centric, smart, strategic team players who are a trusted partner to our clients, and that our new brand should reflect that above all. This was the journey that led us to our new logo:
The spaces in the letterforms are a nod to the fact that we are true team players, that we are greater than the sum of our parts, and that our work is the product of collaboration with each other and with our clients.
The orange touch icon embedded in the center of the logo represents interaction in digital experiences.
It also happens to look incredible on swag:
Once we had our look and feel down, all we needed was a new way to talk about who we are and what we do. In the process, we realized that the elevator pitch from our old website was way too complicated for a brand in 2020:
And in surveying the landscape of our peers, role models and heroes, we noticed that the one and only Metalab had managed to say the same thing in just three words:
Nice one, Metalab.
We had to take a step back and ask — what’s the three word essence of what we do now, with the team we have today? After a lot of wrangling, we got it down to four — we build brand loyalty. Because while we work across the entire customer experience, that’s what it comes down to. Whether we are partnering with our client to design, build, sell or support a product or service, everything we do is in support of one overarching outcome, and that’s to help our clients keep their customers happy and earn new ones every day.
With this new tagline in place, we set about building our new website. We know you’re busy, so we kept our website copy short and our case studies shorter. We added animation for clarity and delight. We had so many great ideas for animating the essence of our new tagline on the home page that we couldn’t pick just one. Somebody said — wait, why do we have to choose? So we didn’t, and that means each time you come back to our website you can see another one. (Let us know which one you like best!)
Those of you who know us know that Tangible has gone through a number of incarnations over the years — we even used to have a different name.* Along the way, we have built an amazing team of more than 30 thoughtful, kind and extraordinarily talented creative professionals. We are both grateful and humbled to have the privilege of working with such an incredible group of people, and we are so excited to have a new brand and website to help us showcase everything they bring to the table for our clients every day. We can’t wait for you to meet them.
If you’re looking for a strategic partner on a business challenge, want to build a culture of innovation within your organization, or both, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line and we’ll be in touch!
-James and Bruce
* For anyone questioning our UX street cred, we challenge you to find a company with a UX-nerdier name than BranchLogic.