When we met the Darwin team, they were closing a round of funding and needed a new visual identity, messaging strategy, and brand voice to support their ambitions to scale into new markets across the country. 

With two primary audiences—renters and property owners—the new brand needed to balance friendliness and expertise. The platform itself is a well-built tech toolkit that ensures hyper local service at scale, so the brand also needed to balance confident innovation with assurance of personal service.

We led Darwin leadership, design, engineering, and marketing teams through workshops and interviews to define creative principles and messaging strategy. We settled on an approach of sophisticated, modernism-inspired visual identity with strong grids. Friendliness and personality flourish through photography of local pros and renters masked by blueprint-inspired shapes. 

Pops of lapis and melon give dimension to the mostly black and white color palette. We created a system of 3-D icons rooted in the house shape of the Darwin logo. We ensured the brand system extends effortlessly between digital and physical contexts with designs for car wraps, printed material, and name badges.

As a growing team, Darwin has a lot of in-house design and development capacity. We set them up for success with the new brand by creating clear and comprehensive brand, voice, social media, email, and stock photography guidelines.