We have spent the last few weeks rethinking the Nimiq brand. This process brought our mission, vision, brand persona and core values to a point where we were able to develop a visual language. We’re proud to finally show you this visual language, and, along with that, we also want to share the process of how we got there.

The Process

First of all, we weren’t starting from scratch. Nearly two years of legacy can’t and shouldn’t be neglected when embarking on a significant brand update. We looked closely at everything that was out there, sat down with the team, and conducted interviews with the community. We asked the hard questions to get an honest understanding of what the brand Nimiq is, rather than just creating an artificial image of what we imagine it to be.

Drawing on those insights, we created a brand persona with character traits and a certain behavior, a persona not rooted in theory but in reality. In this way we can realistically embrace those characteristics that we want Nimiq to be associated with, and work on others that we don’t.

Simplicity

One of the most important values Nimiq strives for is simplicity. In the belief that stripping away everything that’s not necessary will lead to less cognitive load and eventually to a better experience. We took this ideal and built our efforts around it.

The Logo

When we started thinking about a new logo, it was clear from the beginning that we didn’t want to do a U-turn, but instead identify what we want to keep and what needs to go.

Changing the logo was probably the biggest request from the community in terms of rebranding, so we actively included them in this process. We asked for input and got a lot of it — from rough directions to concrete and professional logo suggestions. Interestingly, in most of those suggestions, the hexagon played a central part. We, too, felt that the hexagon, standing on its stable side, was deeply connected with the Nimiq brand. Not only was it part of the logo, it was also used as a key visual for loaders, backgrounds or the world map in the miner, and even found its way into most community projects. We decided to keep it.

On the other hand, it was clear that we should get rid of the dollar sign — based on constant feedback from the community, and some very practical problems like the use as a currency symbol. The most obvious approach was to replace it with some form of an N, to build a stronger connection to the Nimiq wordmark and make it more recognizable.