Wolff Olins unveils global brand refresh, melding creativity and rigor

Wolff Olins has designed hundreds of logos and brand identities across its six decades in business. Now, the London-based global brand consultancy is unveiling its most personal rebrand yet—its own. The company on Tuesday is rolling out a new visual identity, wordmark and website it said better reflect its ethos internally and its client work. Rather than a wholesale rethink, the new identity is an evolution of the prior one—a new shade of yellow, as well as a curvy “W” in Wolff, representing the wildness of creativity, opposite the more serious-minded “O” in Olins, reflecting the rigor of business strategy. The agency said those two elements together represent “the math and the magic” of its approach. Ad Age Creativity Bookmark our section covering the best in brand creativity every day Read more here Getting such disparate elements working in harmony, as the world gets more complex and companies get more siloed, is at the core of Wolff Olins’ offering to clients, Sairah Ashman, its global CEO, told Ad Age in an interview. “Wolff Olins has been very, very firmly planted in both strategy and creativity from the very beginning [in 1965],” said Ashman, who’s been at the company for almost 30 years herself. “This sort of precision and rigor on the one hand, and the wild curiosity and creativity on the other—we've never had to make a choice to be either one. We've always just been both. That was the backbone of the thinking.” Ashman said the funky “W” also reflects the journey Wolff Olins often goes on with clients seeking transformational change—a journey she described as nonlinear, often joyfully so. As for the company’s signature color, she added, the designers wanted to “unmellow the yellow” and make it sharper and more memorable. The brand and website refresh were led by Wayne Deakin and Thomas Wilder, the agency’s global principals for design, along with Tyler King, creative director. They were joined by a large team of creatives, both long-timers and more recent hires. “The new identity signals how we are looking at today’s challenges and finding answers for our clients,” said Deakin. “This journey is far from straightforward, especially in today’s fiercely competitive and messy landscape, but it’s one we enjoy and thrive in.” Read more rebranding and redesign news from Ad Age “We find enjoyment in the wild, weird and wonderful during the creative process as we search out what’s special,” added Wilder. The website was developed in partnership with product studio Oak. It prominently features client work, including recent projects with GSK, LG, Instacart, TikTok, Uber, The Met and Leeum Museum of Art. Ashman said the company embarked on the refresh as a way to better define Wolff Olins in markets where it has been growing and expanding. Wolff Olins now has three U.S. offices in addition to its London headquarters. “As we’re traveling to lots of different parts of the world, we’re discovering that perhaps people don’t know the fullness of what we do,” she said. “In the U.S., we’ve got such a strong creative and design reputation, but some people don’t always know about the other things we do. In other parts of the world, we’ve got really strong strategic reputation. We just want to set the whole story out there—the fullness of what we do and how it delivers the results that we deliver.” Ad Age Creativity Bookmark our section covering the best in brand creativity every day Read more here

Wolff Olins unveils global brand refresh, melding creativity and rigor

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