A brand new look for Russwood
Russwood has a fresh new look, with an updated logo, brand-new emblem and bright new colour palette. Our new branding is more modern, more architectural and more Russwood. In this blog, Marketing Manager, Fiona Finnie shares a first look at the new identity and takes a look back at the evolution of our brand.
Brand beginnings
A lot has changed since Russwood began selling timber in 1990. For the team back then, websites, email and social media wouldn’t have been a consideration.
Nowadays, digital is at the forefront of Russwood’s marketing strategy, and as we continue to innovate and evolve as a business, our brand identity must follow suit.
Russwood’s first logo, seen here on an old Russwood lorry, incorporated a stylised oak tree, with a plank of wood representing the tree trunk, alongside a bold serif word mark.
Evolution
In 2010, Russwood’s marketing team updated the logo to reflect the wider range of timber products on offer. A bold stencil typeface in a dark forest green, nods to the joins in timber cladding.
Further updates were made to the branding in 2018, when the colour was updated to a brighter green.
More recently, we have found that our existing branding was beginning to show signs of strain. Our static logo wasn’t appropriate for all applications and sometimes looked out of place in digital formats. We’ve also outgrown our strapline ‘Flooring, Cladding, Decking’, with our range now including interior cladding, fixing and battening systems and other timber accessories.
Design process
We identified a need for a more dynamic, responsive brand identity to work across all channels, from websites and social media to brochures and printed items. The key was to retain the look and feel of our much-loved brand, while bringing it bang up to date.
We began the process by engaging Kat Scott from brand and design consultancy, K&Co to collaborate with us on our brand refresh project. From the first phone call with Kat, it was clear that her experience and enthusiasm were a great match for Russwood and we were confident that together we would deliver something great.
Kat worked with our marketing team to understand our existing brand and to define, develop and refine our new brand identity. Together we considered the individual elements of the word mark, emblem, strapline and colour palette, and how these would sit together and individually.
Our new brand
A key part of the brief was for our logo to be able to adapt across different platforms. For instance, an emblem is more appropriate for use on social media platforms than a full logo. With our old logo, we were literally trying to fit a square peg into a round hole!
We developed a brand new emblem which can sit alongside the word mark for corporate use or on it’s own for things like social media. The emblem plays with the form and shape of timber to create a unique design where everyone will see something different. What do you see? A building? Two buildings? Floor boards or cladding? Trees?
Another integral part of the brand is the word mark. We wanted something unique, which was modern and architectural, yet retained the feel of our former logo. Our sleek new word mark uses interesting forms and angles, playing on the versatility of timber.
A pop of colour
Green is synonymous with Russwood so we’ve retained that as our main brand colour, albeit a fresher spring-like tone. We’ve also added a range of bright secondary colours to sit alongside the green. You won’t see these colours in many places; the fresh modern palette is designed to compliment and highlight the natural timber tones of the photography that can be seen throughout our website, so keep your eyes peeled for some changes online soon.
Updating our branding is a big task, it’s everywhere! We’ve begun by applying our new brand digitally, on our website, social media channels and email signatures, but some things will take a while to phase out. To limit unnecessary waste, some things, will be phased out as they need replaced, so you might spot the old Russwood brand in some places for a while yet.
We hope you love our refreshed branding as much as we do 💚
