This is 2021.
Can we make it?

This is 2021.

And yes, I believe we can make it! We’re fortunately still standing, following 2020, the year-that-must-not-be-named, a year that will undoubtedly remain in our collective mind as a devastating one. We got a widespread pandemic, a massive death toll from SARS-Cov-2 infections, masks, full lockdowns across the world, closed businesses, furloughs, social upheaval and political distress, conspiracy theories and fake news, widespread disbelief in science… and wonderfully synchronised robot choreographies. The list goes on, and the landscape couldn’t feel more poetic and twisted.

With months of unrest that required physical distancing, at KOBU, we needed to adapt to this new circumstance. Just like many other agencies across the globe, our team has been working mostly remotely for almost 10 months, with all the good and bad that naturally unfolds from it. 

Let’s face it: the initial phase was not comfortable. Given KOBU’s strong connection with the tourism sector, we lost clients and projects in a total of 25% of our projected revenue for 2020. As we started working remotely, we needed to deal with the fact that team dynamics are very different in a digital landscape. One gets consumed with tightly scheduled calls, “I-believe-your-call-is-frozen” delay times, not-so-clear feedbacks and the overall decrease of empathy in human interchange. And then there’s also the psychological toll related to isolation. While a cloak of uncertainty covered the long months of 2020, anxiety stepped in, augmented by the fear of a lack of capacity to steer the ship at the agency. 

As I’m writing this, early in January 2021, we are once again heading to a 30-day period of full lockdown in Portugal but, in hindsight, there is now a strange positive vibe towards the future. How did that come to be?

So, how did we get here?

The first half of the answer is straightforward: a pivotal change we saw in the last trimester of 2020 induced us with some rational optimism. Even if the pandemic disrupted our business goals for the year, we were able to recover from the initial setbacks while maintaining the full team without furloughs. We saw a steady increase in lead qualification and pitched some of the most exciting projects in the agency’s life. Amidst the chaos, we launched a new digital game for people in confinement (Corona Wash & Vax) to raise awareness to health and safety measures, won four film awards with our 2019 LGBTQ+ campaign “Proudly Portugal“, prepared brand new campaigns for the agency and for KOBU Foundry in 2021, gained new clients in new countries, strengthened the relationships with old ones and worked on exciting projects. More importantly, we kept close track of our processes to pinpoint and understand our failures, and implement solutions that lead to a much clearer path forward.

The second half of the answer is more nuanced and, as I see it, more interesting. It begins with a realisation that we are seeing the first results of a slow rebranding process that was put in motion two years ago, leading to the decision that both Sandra and I made early in the Covid19 pandemic: despite the hindrances, we would do whatever necessary to keep everything running smoothly, with a particular emphasis in ensuring that the team would remain intact. After all, we strive to be a “people’s first” brand. The decision made led us into a resilience path where the increase in free time and availability of 45% of our team (a.k.a. non-billable time) was invested in doing what we love the most: create. 

We openly asked everyone on the team for ideas or suggestions for internal projects to develop during the lockdown period and following months. Several solutions came into being: repurposing work that we were already developing into a Covid19 awareness game, creating a children’s story to portray this new reality, developing brand campaigns, complementing the agency’s portfolio, among others. 

From a business perspective, allowing people to dwell on non-billable work may seem like a risky move, especially in a period of economic crisis such as the one that followed the Covid19 world spread. But, oh, I can assure you, it was worthwhile. For instance, KOBU Foundry was featured in September’s IdN Magazine Vol. 26 Nº 3 with our Type Designer, Brígida Guerreiro, landing on its cover. Later, in December 2020, “Corona Wash & Vax” was picked up by Editor X in their Web Design Trends for 2021 project, more specifically on Trend #7 Free Play, focused on the increase of websites that use gaming to simply make people feel good (something that, by the way, we firmly believe brands should be looking at more frequently).

At the heart of this choice is a mindset shift that started in 2018 when frustration piled up with the type of projects that were frequently heading our way. We, as a branding and digital agency, needed to solve this conundrum we usually addressed in our clients’ projects (or so we thought), specifically to:

• implement a rebranding strategy to reposition ourselves
• have a more thorough understanding of our core values and work towards alignment with the team and clients
• define long-term goals for the agency
• assess the type of projects that excites us enough to deliver great work
• find how to navigate design space to spot our place in this market.

A rebranding from the inside-out.

Assessing the type of projects that excites us enough to deliver great work may seem a simple task, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. It is probably the most challenging from the above list and definitely the most time consuming: it is an introspective journey to uncover the best service we can deliver and how to get there. 

For contextual purposes, let me go back in time for a bit. When I founded KOBU, back in 2014, I was a 31-year old that had been working as a freelance web designer for 4 years after deciding to leave my academic career behind and failing in a first business attempt caught in the 2008 economic crisis. In Portugal, we were still recovering from that, unemployment rates were high, and my mindset was set into earning enough to make a living while working long hours to cope with the amount of work that was coming my way irrespective of the project type. When I started developing KOBU, initially by my own, I carried that same “fast growth mindset”, together with a relatively big network of clients, to the company. Sandra joined me in this venture in 2015, and after we landed our first major retainer client, we kept the same high-throughput pace, and, fortunately, word-of-mouth kept the clients coming. After four years, the team was growing to 16 people.

Despite the success we were having business-wise, in 2018, I started noticing some troubling issues. We were having a hard time growing our average ticket, we had an unhealthy dependency on the tourism segment, and there was a widespread frustration over the type of projects we developed. It felt like our collective creative mind was being drained. KOBU was approached mostly to execute “creative” projects but had little to no capacity to implement those same projects according to what we believed were the best design solutions. As we watched our worldwide references come up with really inspiring work, we were left feeling stuck. The description we use from the start, “Laboratory for Design and Digital Experiences”, was missing the meaning of its main word – laboratory. Something needed to change. 

So what to do? We could try to go for the services we provide our clients: maybe some cold e-mailing to attract new clients or Facebook/Instagram advertising to reach more people, or even put some free pitches in place. For some reason, none of the above sounded right. By that time, I was reading a lot, and three books gave me some valuable insights: “Deep Work” by Cal Newport, “The Win Without Pitch Manifesto” by Blair Enns and “Agencynomics” by Spencer Gallagher and Peter Hoole (strongly recommend those!). It became obvious to me that the problem should be addressed from within. Questions like “Do we want to become a big agency or remain a lifestyle agency?”, “What do we actually believe in?”, “Why are we doing this?”, kept emerging and were a clear sign that we needed to start rebranding KOBU – not visual-wise (“to change our logo”), but instead going deep at the core of our business. To unearth what are the things that drive us to excel at what we do: our values.

To kickstart this process, we searched for specific patterns in our approach to design space problems and found that summing those up in a manifesto would be an excellent way to convey them. We asked our dear friend Maru (Marcelo Souto) to join this process and try to portray our ideas through a visual language – in these processes, it is imperative to get an outsider’s look. He kindly interviewed every team member to understand each of us’s likes and dislikes, what drives us, each person’s role and personality, primary skills, preferred projects and hobbies. Six months of work resulted in a 10-sections manifesto that describes the agency and its people, presenting our ethos: how we want to work, what we’re looking for in business relationships, the time we feel is necessary to our approach, and more. Maru transformed these into 10 beautiful illustrations that work as a whole, filled with exquisite details and hidden meanings (some of them only discoverable to specific people). These metaphors are now part of the décor of KOBU.

But this was only the beginning.

Stay weird. Find meaning. Push boundaries.

The next step of this internal analysis was to review our processes, specifically our lead generation process, our approach to content through digital channels and our “tone of voice” – the way we speak as a brand. Some significant changes were done as a consequence. 

For example, even if there is a high degree of introversion among the team (I guess the 80s and 90s imprinted a small nerd in each one of us), empathy and confidence are deeply nourished at the agency. How could we translate that into our processes? Our Lead Generation form on this website was a boring contact form as seen elsewhere. We drastically improved its UI and, consequently, how you experience it, by adding a video that generates human connection, guiding you through the process in a natural tone. From then on, our website became a living entity, continually being revised and improved.

We always supported our clients’ work from a pedagogical standpoint, making our points through reason, argumentation and detailed explanations. Notwithstanding, we never really cared to convey that to our audience. How could we start communicating that to the world? We decided to change our content strategy to make it long-form, a time-consuming path and not prone to the fast pace that social media algorithms require. That is ok. Following that decision came a new opportunity: to use different media to convey our ideas. And thus Insight Booth was born.

While all the pieces were being put into place, we needed to guarantee actionable guidelines to generate alignment, keep the team motivated, and assess change. Our values were then summed into three brand propositions:

1. Stay weird. 
   In every project, stay weird. Weird is good and keeps the creative flame burning. Avoid safe solutions because everything that provokes weirdness simply means that we don’t yet have a mental model for it. That is an essential tool to build identity and uniqueness. How many of the most unforgettable music albums sounded a bit strange at first, and only after some listenings unveiled the real power of its details?
   
2. Find meaning. 
   Always look for concepts that challenge us. Imprinting meaning into work will generate a sense of fulfilment for our clients and us. Metaphor and association, either through word or image, are tools to create meaning and make something memorable. Humans have one of the most exciting brains, just because we live in a fast-paced world never strive for work that dumbifies people.
   
3. Push boundaries.
   In every project, build up from what we did before and look to expand further. That will allow us to keep discovering new challenges and continuously improve. It will feel uncomfortable at first, but the design space is endless — the strength of slow and gradual improvement is highly underestimated. Let’s use our time on this Earth to explore it.

Expressing KOBU’s brand visually.

Since you’ve got this far, I hope that, by now, I’ve given you a nuanced perspective of what a rebranding really is – a balancing act between listening internally and externally, aligning behaviours and perceptions across brand touchpoints. Yes, it also means, rethinking how to express all of these different parts, consistently, visually. And that is as interesting as the stages before. Despite the reduced blue-red colour palette, KOBU’s visual universe has always been diverse and filled with unexpected characters that have arisen spontaneously, almost as totems for the brand. That reflects our love for visual charades, cultural references to the 80s and 90s and hidden meanings left to interpretation by the most inquisitive. For instance, if you stumble in our website’s 404 pages, you’ll find random messages reminiscent of an 80s vibe that is so dear to us – after all, we’re 80s kids. I will leave the mysterious white horse in our homepage open for interpretation, but let me just say that white horses have long lived through mythological stories. To fully grasp how to translate the brand’s proposition into a visual language, let’s make quick stops in some of its design elements.

Logotype: after careful consideration, we decided that we shouldn’t drastically change our logo, the main reason being its essence still holds. KOBU’s symbol has a dual meaning: it captures ammonite shells’ golden rule while an outward/inward spiral, in negative space, represents the changes in creative energy. We made only minor optical adjustments in the symbol, but the wordmark was entirely redesigned to create a more balanced composition and improve legibility.

Colours: the agency’s semi-neutral colour palette (blue, red, white and shades of grey) remained untouched as we feel it balances the diversity of key visuals in the brand. 

Typography: we jumped straight into customised fonts as they add to the uniqueness of the brand. Brígida designed KOBU Headline and KOBU Text, a condensed and a sans-serif typeface, respectively, conveying the audacity and curiosity that mirror our values. These two typefaces work in tandem and are also part of the subbrands, Foundry and Photon.

Key visuals: during this rebranding, we embraced the plethora of KOBU’s key visuals: the eye, the red sofa, line-based classic statues (what we call “entropic humans”). All of these elements were already somehow in the visual universe but lacked meaning and spotlight. For instance, the icon with the red lined eye kept appearing near some links in our website. But consider this: the eye is the receptor that helps us create our visual map of reality but, at the same time, tricks us into weird illusions. It made total sense to give it centre stage, to be welcoming and connect minds. The red sofa, an actual sofa at the agency, is a totem to think, engage and empathise; a place where we share ideas and welcome people to join us in our creativity. These apparently unrelated elements in the visual universe are made coherent through meaning-making.

Additionally, we’ve also played around with graphic composition resulting in what you can now see through our print assets and social media feeds and stories. During the next years, I can only expect that KOBU’s visual universe will continue to evolve and adapt slightly, as long as it remains faithful and expresses our core propositions. Stay weird. Find meaning. Push boundaries. 

In case you’re interested in reading a bit more about the brand’s visual changes we went through, I recommend you head to this article.

Entropic humans.

In 2020, most of the tasks mentioned earlier were nearly finished, and we began to think of how to communicate this new positioning to the outside world. We’d love to structure a campaign under a theme that could grow over time. After some brainstorming sessions, something came up: “Our goal as a company is to create and tell brand stories. Imagine that we could write the brand’s story into a tv series script, how would that look like? Wouldn’t that start a creative journey of discovery into KOBU’s ethos?” Studying the agency’s manifesto, we searched for metaphors to express its ten sections, using our key visuals to produce the main titles of a tv series. Can you imagine how exciting this became? 

The project was titled “Entropic humans”. It is a sequence of dark visuals that encompass our will to blur the boundaries between chaos and order, the drivers behind all creative endeavours – thus the adjective “entropic”. It attempts to draw the brand’s persona through a conceptual abstraction of the company’s values and propositions, enticing you to find hidden meanings in the smallest details, revealed through visual charades and ambiguous metaphors. Furthermore, by sharing and explaining the effort and careful attention to particulars, we hope to convey our approach to building brands.

“Entropic humans” is a statement that upholds our weirdness, reaching out to everyone that relates to it. Do you?

What the future holds.

Two years have passed, and this rebranding process is still going on. If you made it this far, I must assume that you are interested in how we work or think. I humbly appreciate your attention. The very fact that you have just read an article that is 3512 words long is already a glimpse of its success. Why did I take the time to go over some details of these two years? I could’ve gone the easy road, and simply list our initial goals, state the steps and share the results. Instead, I took you on a relatively long trip through our thought process. Because this is what excites us. By doing so, I may stumble upon a brain, reading these words from that side of the screen, that recognises the value embued in this approach. Because if we state that we’re looking for fully transparent partners in our manifesto, we must lead by example.

Maintaining alignment between a brand and a business is an ongoing task. As a result of this introspective journey we have now realised that if you want to hire us to simply design a logo, we’ll probably have to politely decline. Not that we think, in any way, that your project ain’t worth it. To get us excited we want to be involved at a deeper level, because “designing a logo” is a small fraction of building a brand. 

The job is far from finished. There are many problems identified and seldom do we have enough time to deal with them all. So we prioritise. We do not prepare our case-studies with the frequency we’d like so that you have a clear cut image of what we do. Sometimes you may try to contact us, and we’ll take too much time to follow-up. It’s possible that you may have received a quote proposal one month (!) after the initial meeting. Even to the best of our efforts, some projects still spill their forecasted timeframes. I must apologise if this has ever happened in one of your interactions with KOBU. And I hear you. We’re only human, but I can assure you that, bit by bit, we’ll be better.

As 2021 unfolds the 7th anniversary of KOBU Agency, and we head into a new lockdown in Portugal, uncertainty will probably push us for some more challenges. The new mindset brought by this rebranding allowed us to project ourselves in the long-term and, for example, there is already a plan to create something exquisite in 2024 (which may, or may not happen). We know where we want to be, the creative freedom we aspire, and some ideas on getting there. The thing to remember is that sometimes, driven by external factors, we let ourselves get caught in the anxiety of quick results. Let’s get over that. Since the 19th century, Darwin and evolutionary biologists have been unravelling the story of how the natural beauty around us came to be. It is not a story about quick recipes for success. It relies on DNA (core values), variation (experimentation) and adaptability (constant change). We are not here for the sprint – great work takes time.