Atlas-Heritage Title arrived with strong brand affinity. They wanted to hold onto that, so their customers wouldn't need any reintroduction. Rather than reinvent their brand identity from scratch, we decided to modernize it, while keeping it familiar at the same time. We began with color.
Color
Atlas-Heritage Title's former three-color palette
Atlas-Heritage Title had three core brand colors. We updated the core palette and expanded it to give colors specific purpose, introducing a new Heritage Blue as an oceanic metaphor with complementary shades of gray.
With Atlas-Heritage Title's core brand colors defined, we added secondary and tertiary colors. As can be seen on their website, we used green to inform and red to prompt user action.
Logo
It was important that we keep recognizable characteristics of Atlas-Heritage Title's outgoing logo intact. So, we used it as the basis for the refresh.
Atlas-Heritage Title's former logo
We had several goals to accomplish with the new logo:
- Make the logo brighter
- Increase readability
- Simplify its components
- Eliminate the legal name
- Retain the current typography
While Atlas-Heritage Title LLC is the company's legal name, its customers identify with them as Atlas-Heritage Title. So, we removed the LLC. And, to increase readability, we removed the gray H from the text background. Its contrast with the blue text made it difficult to read, especially from a distance.
The globe had a gradient, intending to demonstrate a light source. However, it made the logo look soft and gave it an out-of-date looking 3D appearance. We removed the gradient.
Continuing on our theme of simplification, we removed a number of small land shapes from the globe. Especially at small sizes, they were difficult to recognize and could be confused with specs of dust as printing errors.
To brighten the logo, we eliminated the remaining gray from all land masses. We made all land white. Then, we replaced the two shades of blue with Heritage Blue. The text and horizontal lines previously had one shade. The globe had another.
Finally, we gave the logo text more vertical space between the horizontal lines, resulting in a less crowded feel. We completed the logo refresh with a brighter, two-color logo.
Symbology
Mobile phones have changed how customers interact with brands. A lot more brand engagement happens on a small screen. That introduces a challenge for logos which have a lot of text and don't fit neatly inside of a square. Social media profile images are always perfect squares or cropped to a circle. Atlas-Heritage Title needed a brand symbol.
It was important that the brand symbol share characteristics with Atlas-Heritage Title's logo, so it would connect customers to their brand in the same way. We kept the globe and earth shapes. Adding the lower half of the globe and accompanying geography would have made the symbol less recognizable. Instead, we abbreviated Atlas-Heritage Title as AHT, and made the lower earth shape trail into the H. It's a clean look that looks well on small screens. It also works as a square shaped or circular profile badge.
Typography
We had already decided to keep Atlas-Heritage Title's logo font, Minion Pro, as core to the brand. As a primary brand element, we would use it and Crimson Text (as an open source proxy) in headings to anchor written content to their brand. We chose for Montserrat for body text. It's pleasing to the eye and easy to read.
Website
Atlas-Heritage Title's website was in need of a redesign. Their former site wasn't responsively designed, so it didn't look good on mobile phones. It also lacked features like SSL, which were scarcely or totally unavailable at the time of its original construction. We would replace the website in its entirety.
Atlas-Heritage Title's former website
The new website gave us the opportunity to incorporate Atlas-Heritage Title's new brand elements, increase clarity, deliver mobile accessibility, and provide a faster and more secure visitor experience.
Heritage Blue anchors the site. The darker Cello blue is used for the menu; the night sky navigates the visitor's eye to earth. On mobile phones, the interplay is expressed through the gradient menu background.
Social media
Using Atlas-Heritage Title's new brand symbol, we updated their Facebook page. Among other updates, we changed the page name to match how people know them. We added a cover image that's equally readable on all screen sizes. Then, we added individual services, representative icons, and detailed service descriptions. We treated Facebook as a search engine, like Google, and made Atlas-Heritage easier to find on social media.
Brand sustainability
Giving new life to a brand and delivering a modern website are important characteristics of a brand identity. It's also important that content exists to support a brand's sustainability (consistent use), so companies can easily stay true to their visual identity. For Atlas-Heritage Title, brand assets needed to be made available; for use by Atlas-Heritage Title and their partners. In the absence of such assets, the brand could be inaccurately represented in print and digital form. So, we created a brand website for Atlas-Heritage Title.
