Our original visual identity was designed with the website, a few rider boxes and some business cards in mind. At that point, no one imagined we’d ever do an advertising campaign or have a kit that would be worn by thousands of riders in twelve different countries.

We had a hero colour — teal — and our kangaroo logo.

Fast forward three years and our visual identity needed to work a lot harder. We wanted a style of art direction that could celebrate our love for food. We wanted to give our riders kit they’d be proud to wear, that enhanced their visibility and safety both day and night. Finally, we needed a mark that could come to stand for great food and work as a favicon as well as it would on a billboard.

We picked branding agency DesignStudio for the project. In their pitch they’d blown us away with their creative, collaborative approach and their dedication to understanding what sits at the heart of our business ­– great restaurants and a great fleet of riders. They carried out customer service shifts, became riders themselves and ate enough to get a sense of what restaurant delivery really means.

But it wasn’t all fun and food. Before anyone put pen to paper, DesignStudio carried out a full semiotics analysis, looking at what our logo meant in other cultures and countries. A few members of their design team took part in workshops across the business too, discussing our collective vision for Deliveroo and where we could one day see our visual identity being used. You can read more about our founder’s vision here.

We explored a variety of routes for a new logo– ­some that kept the kangaroo as its primary inspiration, to completely new logos that left our kangaroo roots behind. What the process highlighted was that both internally and externally our Roo had become a beloved part of our brand.

Some of our early explorations

What we landed on was an evolution from our original and more literal take on the kangaroo, turning it into a striking new mark bold and impactful, but still maintaining the character and charm of the Roo.

The new Roo mark

The angles that define our new Roo

Importantly, this new Roo gave us a series of angles that would help the rest of our graphic system take shape. A system that would run across everything, from our site to our rider kit.

The word mark

The rider kit

The rider kit presented a whole new set of creative challenges. While our primary concern was making sure it was for rider safety, we also wanted it to be something our riders — many of them pretty serious about cycling — would enjoy wearing too. We consulted road safety organisation, Brake, and we asked our riders what they’d like to wear.

On Brake’s advice we added the hyper­reflective material on the waist, shoulders and wrists of the jackets to demonstrate the movement of our riders’ bodies at night, and amped up the colours in our kit for the day. Our riders in warmer climates asked us for jerseys that allowed them to keep cool and our riders in colder places wanted a truly waterproof jacket to keep them dry. The result — and the reception from our riders­ — has made the design process, with its many iterations and the tests, worthwhile.

The kit at night

Bright, colourful and expressive new jerseys

Finally, our toolkit would not have been complete without a photography style that could hero food in all its juicy, oozy, real­-life detail. With hyper­-real colours, textures and mouth­watering clarity, this style of art direction showed the messiness of food in its tangible, up­close glory.

Some of our beautiful new photography

It’s been an incredibly exciting process, and we’re thrilled to be able to share the outcomes today. This is just the start of our journey in our new look, and we can’t wait to see where it takes us from here.

Look out for more posts in the coming weeks where we’ll delve deeper into these elements of our new brand toolkit and how they come to life across all the formats, from ATL to online.

The Deliveroo Design Team