Becoming Zinc

By Josh Collie, Zinc’s Lead Designer

What is a brand?

A brand is more than a logo, it encompasses every facet of your business — your name, your products, how you talk, your culture and how others perceive you. When your brand vision is spot on, it reflects and supports the business strategy, differentiates you from competitors and resonates with customers, making you recognisable, memorable and trusted in the marketplace.

Zinc’s decision to rebrand from R_Block was a team one. Whilst rebranding is a time intensive piece of work, we knew the decision and the timing would serve us well, helping to solidify who we are and what we stand for. We had been on a big journey as R_Block, but things were developing quickly. With funding under our belt, some talented new team members and a product undergoing rapid development, we felt that on the precipice of our launch, we needed an exciting new brand identity as a face for our business. Visual brands are an important touchpoint that informs consumer opinion of a company’s ideals, positioning and style. Solid brands are constructed, moulded and forged over a long period of time through business consumer interaction and business goals. It’s anything but a logo.

R_Block logo

Our existing logo served its purpose but was unimaginative, had inherent technical limitations didn’t encompass the values we wanted to exude going forward. At the same time, the team is deep in the build of our product and require a visual identity that cohesively sits in the product alongside colours, type and has the ability to adapt to new situations.

Product designs

Subsequent to team discussions around messaging, audience, and how we communicate, we developed a much clearer picture of how and by whom we want our product to be perceived. We’re appealing to the tech and blockchain community and we are creating an efficient hiring application.

To begin understanding the aforementioned values and visual preferences we ran a Google Design sprint. A primary outcome from the session was what we wanted to represent in our new branding.

Visually, we wanted to convey the three core tenets: trust, futurism and empowerment.

Visual direction

The majority of other crypto projects had branding which followed a very similar vein, encompassing a logo with word-mark. Whilst there is nothing wrong with this, we wanted something unique that would work responsively from mobile to billboards.

The Zinc application is backed by an Ether based currency which is used to pay for transactions on the network. We began our research studying money of the world and looked at historic coins for inspiration in an attempt to find an interesting motif that could be used in branding or the logotype.

Cretan coins

I came across Cretan coins with a labyrinth pattern which makes for a unique motif and recurring visual element. It’s also a great metaphor for the technology we use and the idea of trust and security. Unicursal labyrinths are a one-way maze that I saw as analogous to encryption one way to encrypt and decrypt data.

We created some concepts based around these ideas, one of which that we believe to be the front runner waspitched to the team a day later. People were very supportive of the vision and applications presented.

Zinc logo

Our brands colour palette is inspired by the chemical flame test for Zinc where Zinc in a flame gives off a bright green light. We thought green would also work to exhibit the themes of verification, accessibility and trust we wish to portray. These are still in flux but we hope to share our entire design system with the world soon.

Palette

We’re aren’t standing still quite yet. Brands are ever evolving and while we’re happy with the direction we are heading, there are many small refinements that could improve the brand. Over the coming months we’ll be working hard on both the product and visual aspects to Zinc.

Iconography

We truly believe in sharing our design process and output irrespective of whether they are pixel perfect because it’s how we can create conversations and show the work that goes into those final pixels you see.

We’ll be writing more about the design of the application going forward including typography, animation, web development and working across multiple disciplines.