Evolving the Ribbon Identity

Today we're sharing our new logo and a new direction for our overall look. Over the last weeks, some of you will have noticed that we've started gradually rolling out a new colour scheme on our website, and today we'll be updating our branding across our channels. Here's a breakdown of the thinking behind the new logo and how we got here.

So why the change?

Combining a square, a triangle and a circle to form a blue letter "R", we thought our old logo had elements that made it possible to build a cohesive brand and identity around. But through talking to both prospective and current users, it became clear that it wasn't very memorable. Strong and recognisable brands take a long time to build, but it was clear that our previous logo wasn't something people could develop strong associations with. Not great.

Connect, iterate and make decisions at speed

We started thinking through what our identity as a company was actually about. At the core, we help product and user research teams do three things.

Connect with your users: One of the initial frustrations that drove us to start Ribbon was how difficult it was to get good, qualitative insights about users when we were building products. To have conversations with users, we were forced to either go through the tedious process of manually recruiting users (which takes a lot of time) or rely on testing panels (which meant the people we spoke to usually weren't real users). Not ideal. With Ribbon, we dead simple for researchers to connect with real users, in the right context, without having to compromise on research quality or drown in time-consuming admin work.

Continuously test & iterate: We're big believers in the benefits of continuous testing, research and discovery when it comes to building great products that people love. Helping users is a continuous process, on so should research and discovery be. By making it easy to engage your users in research, we want to make it easier for product teams to adopt this practice without compromising their speed of shipping or quality of research.

Make product decisions at speed: It's easy to feel that investing in doing more discovery than you're currently doing will slow your team down. By making it easy to connect with your users and test and iterate on designs and concepts quickly, we aim to help teams reduce the time it takes to get the insights they need to make important product decisions confidently.

To get here, we developed and tried out a few different directions. Here's a quick glimpse of a few of the options we tested and evaluated before settling on the new logo.

A vibrant new colour palette

We've developed a vibrant new colour palette that's easily recognisable, with a distinct blue as our primary colour, and a range of accent colours which will be used selectively across our website and other channels.

This new brand lays the foundation for growing Ribbon and help even more teams continuously engage their users in research and make faster and better product decisions.

Cheers,

the Ribbon team