Invaluable Brand Update

Previous Brand Guide and Quick Reference

New Brand Guide

Along with expanding on the visual system and product logo suite, care was taken to develop and standardize the voice and structure of how the brand communicates with guidelines to be used across teams.

Tone of Voice

After working with a third party to analyze the consumer’s archetype, users were assessed to be determined, emotionally invested, and influenced by their environment. These insights informed a brand personality that is: approachable, passionate, and intelligent to match. Because tone of voice had never been formally defined, this research helped shape clear guidelines and examples for how the brand should communicate across the auction experience.

Brand Architecture

As new products were introduced under both Invaluable and its sister brand, AuctionZip, confusion grew around how the different offerings related to one another. Teams described the ecosystem in different ways, and the relationship between brands and products lacked clarity.

Free-Standing: Our Old Approach
Interviews with employees revealed that many people had different interpretations of the company structure, and some were unaware of the parent brand entirely.

A new product structure was developed to clarify how the two brands and their products connect, while preparing for future additions. The goal of this restructuring was to build brand equity with a cohesive, intuitive ecosystem where the value could be easily understood and communicated.

Monolithic: Our New Approach
The updated structure places greater emphasis on the parent brand since users strongly identify our products with either Invaluable or AuctionZip. This approach helps establish trust and continuity across products while maintaining the strength of each primary brand.

Product Logo Suite

The monolithic brand architecture informed a revised product logo system. Each sub-brand prominently features the parent brand, with a secondary type treatment to maintain a distinct identity and ensure visibility of the brand relation across various color states.

List of rules can be seen in this presentation.

Color Palette

Red remained the core brand color due to its strong association with passion (a well-known feeling to collectors). Gold accents and deep neutrals were introduced to reflect the luxury and heritage of the auction world, while white allows a clear canvas for artwork to to sit against.

Typography

The typefaces selected are clean, professional fonts that speak to modern and traditional times and present Invaluable as a forward-thinking company while still acknowledging and celebrating the past.

Georgia, a serif typeface with a traditional, elegant feel, speaks to the long-standing history of the auction industry. Georgia should be used in short consecutive phrases to emphasize the section it is highlighting.

Gotham is a versatile, modern typeface that has a luxury feel when used in its thinner weight. Its geometric shape makes it extremely legible, especially when viewed on digital mediums.

Imagery

The photos used across the Invaluable site and materials most often fall into one of three categories: the anonymous person to allow the user to put themselves in the anonymous person’s perspective, lifestyle to demonstrate how the objects won may live with the collector and the most-used, single-product image.

We also developed custom illustrations to support key moments in the user journey without relying on screengrabs that could become outdated.