The Story Behind Interfone’s New Branding

The Brief

Interfone is a Singapore registered company that provides high-quality and cost-effective voice & data roaming solutions for the enterprise, corporate and traveller markets. With an extensive network in more than 100 countries globally, Interfone works with the top mobile operators to connect customers to the best network regardless of their location.

For the launch of their latest product – a chip for clients to embed onto their SIM Card and save up to 90% off roaming fees – Interfone approached Pixel Tie with the requirement to refresh their branding. These new identity guidelines would need to have a positive impact on public’s perception of the company.

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Our Answer

Contrary to popular belief, working on branding is not just a design effort. A branding project requires a systematic approach that includes brand strategy, industry research and design before implementing a cohesive identity to the company’s website, printed materials and communications system. At Pixel Tie, we adopted a 3-step approach to help our client:

1. Brand Analysis

This consist of a customer and competitor analysis, followed by a current brand audit to have a better understanding of the situation and requirements. Some questions we asked include “Who are their audience? What are the trends? What are the needs and perception of the industry? What are the strengths and weaknesses of our client against their competitors? What is their promise and position in the market?” and so on.

2. Verbal System

From the above results, we identified the weakness and strength of the brand and kept this in mind to develop the tone of voice that is to be used in all their communication.

We also came up with a new tagline in which we encapsulated the essence of the brand:
‘Globally Connected’ – an expression of their goal in helping clients through their innovative call solutions, ensuring consistent quality and competitive calls for all their key stakeholders anywhere, anytime.

3. Visual System

The next and primordial step was to design their new logo that should stick to user’s mind by representing the most important values of the company.

However, we also had 2 clear indications from Interfone. They wanted something that would stands out by both incarnating modernity and classiness and they wanted us to have some Scandinavian reference in their logo as the CEO being originally from Denmark.

Following these 2 criteria, we started our researches on the form that would represent best Interfone’s main product (chip). The trick at this stage is to not fall into a form that ‘describe’ a chip like an icon would do. A logo should either be a figurative or abstract representation but it shouldn’t be an illustration. Here a sample of what we found:

What seemed to be the most interesting was the curves inside the chip itself. Figurative enough to remind people of a chip but far enough from an illustration of a chip to fall into iconography.

We also dived into the 1960s & 1970s Scandinavian design logos to see if we could take something from there to respect the second request of our client.

This design movement was characterized by the simplicity, minimalism and functionality. Our takeaway from these logos are also the way the scandinavian designers were systematically playing around with font and geometry: most of these logos are embedded in a square or circle.

It was time to consolidate our research and work on some final designs.

1. We had the design element to represent the chip;
2. we understood a bit more about scandinavian design movement guidelines.

Consequently, we stylized (to treat in a simplified and non-realistic style) the chip design to modernize it for logo purpose and we added a bit of a scandinavian touch to it.

Finally we did some font testing to find the thin, elegant and futurist font that would represent both our client’s industry and scandinavian design and we added our fresh new tagline. Here is the final result:

From this point, and after the client approval (we had several logo concept on the top of that one), we could start the implementation of a cohesive identity to the company’s website, printed materials and communications system:

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THE RESULT

Interfone has yet to see any quantitative results as they have not commence their online campaign. However they really like the simplicity of the logo as it can be easily applied to their social media artwork, presentations and even use it as an app icon. The new logo helps in positioning Interfone as a young & modern tech innovator.