Yes Lets are a social enterprise that helps underrepresented tenants find a home, focusing on the individual and their unique story to provide a more inclusive experience. They almost act as a matchmaker for landlords and tenants, ensuring the right fit and offering often overlooked tenants a chance to find a home; whilst still providing landlords with reassurance and trust in the process.
We loved their mission and felt privileged that they got in touch to ask if we’d help create their identity and website. However, as a charitable enterprise, budget can often be tight, and this was no different. But despite this, we really wanted to partner with their vision and it forced us to get creative with how we might tackle the project.
Earlier in the year, we’d seen the Philadelphia based Smith & Diction running what they called ‘Brand Sprints’. Borrowed from the start-up world, a sprint is essentially a short, time-bound, hyper-focussed burst of effort on one thing. The principle was the same, but they had applied to the design of a brand.
It sounded rebellious, a break from ‘the process’, but it also felt like an exciting challenge that was so crazy that it might just work. And the fact that is was a short time-bound period, with a myriad of compromises, meant that we could work to a more accessible budget level. We got excited.
When we explained the concept of a one-week Brand Sprint to Jen from Yes Lets, she loved the sound of it and couldn’t wait to get started. If you’ve ever heard of the 80/20 Pareto Principle, we were essentially applying this in a very real way, and friends, the results surprised us — keep reading!
Day 1 — DREAMING
We kicked our Brand Sprint off with a condensed Foundation Workshop first thing on Monday morning. Borrowing ideas from our comprehensive Foundation Workshop, our goal is to unfold the dreams, vision, values and all that makes them, them.
We want to hear everything. From how it all began to their audacious goals for the future. This foundation session is pivotal to the brand positioning and running of the week as we gain understanding of the business as a whole and learn what truly matters to them and their audience.
It was during this call that the client mentioned that they wanted Tenants to be viewed as more than what’s just on their paper applications, and that behind every tenant, is a story. This little comment ended up becoming a core part of the messaging and taglines that we developed later in the week.
Normally we’d run the Foundation Workshop in person, but even travel into town felt like unproductive time, so it was a hello to our good old friend Google Meet.
Day 2: RAPID PROTOTYPING
After the dreaming and exploring, we began to form some brand identity directions, batting them around the team for challenging and developing, “why did you do that?” “What if we did this?”. The brutal time limit on this phase (one day), meant that you never had long enough to dwell or endlessly tweak and were forced to move on to new ideas or variations. It felt a lot like the process of rapid prototyping.
At the end of the day, our rapid refinement left us with three distinct directions to present to the Yes Lets team the next morning. Of course, we’d skipped some of the steps from our full branding process (I can feel the Brand Designers DM’ing me as I write), but we were honestly shocked by what was achievable within one day (or just the 20%).
Day 3: THE VOTE
This was the big day.
We won’t lie, this being the first Brand Sprint we’d done, walking into the meeting (virtually speaking of course) there was a sense of unknown. Are our ideas going to land? Was that direction as good as we thought it was with tired eyes last night? You never know, but we felt confident that one of our three ideas would be a good foundation to build on.
It was hard to neglect the thought that this meeting determines the running of the rest of the week.
But... Breathe...
It was a huge success, their words “ so much better than what I could have imagined” goes pretty far in our books. By the end of the day we had agreed on a direction and the final refinement work began.
While we’d been waiting for the final feedback, we’d mapped out the website and wireframes. The productivity guru’s would have been proud.
Interestingly, we've been experimenting with using AI to improve the efficiency and speed of this process which is, well, weird and cool all at the same time. But more on that another day.
Day 4: BUILDING A BRAND TOOL KIT
Now that the direction was clear, we could focus our attention on refinement and the building of the brand tool kit. Perhaps it would have been acceptable to leave out any kind of Brand Guidelines in such a condensed sprint, but our belief is that guidelines are absolutely essential as it gives the team, and any future teams or collaborators, guidance on how they can implement and execute the brand consistently, coherently and conformably (not sure if you could tell, I worked quite hard for that alliteration).
Our Brand Tool Kit consists mainly of Brand Guidelines outlining how to use the typography and colour systems, imagery guidelines, logo usage, and a few other pieces of design language (e.g speech bubble usage). The rest of the tool kit consists mainly of files, logo files, social media avatars, favicon’s, typography files etc. Basically, a lot for a weeks work.
Day 5: WE’RE DONE ALREADY?
At the start of the week we’d assumed that Friday was going to be a takeaway in the office type of night, but we found that our planning and efforts to meet deadlines all round meant that it was more of a wrapping up rather than a breaking down.
We spent the morning refining the Brand Tool Kit before moving back to the website. In order to fit the website into the week, we focussed on creating a single landing page, rather than a full website. It was also a hugely collaborative process with both our team and Yes Lets team helping to compile copywriting and imagery.
We’re working on our next new product, the ONE DAY WEBSITE™️. Yeah, that’s a joke, we’re definitely not.
I won’t lie, the website didn’t quite go as smoothly as everything else. We encountered a few bugs that we ended up needing some support from our external developer friend Mario the week after.
The lesson learned was that a website really requires it’s own sprint week to be done properly, and that’ll be our approach going forward.
What a week. What an experience. Honestly, when we started playing around with this wild idea of a Brand Sprint, we had reservations. And we’ll be the first to say that it’s by no means a silver bullet, there are plenty of compromises involved, but for the right partnership (there’s lots of trust and relationship required) we’ve found it to be a great way to deliver a meaningful return-on-investment branding solution at a more accessible budget. And in our books, that’s a win.
Going forward, we’ll definitely be offering this as a service, but like we said, it requires the right kind of fit and so we’ll be quite selective about who we work with on this to ensure we continue to get great results.
If you want to know more about the Sprint process, or our full Branding Process then get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.
