Why we felt it was time to give ourselves a refresh.

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As you may already know, Leto means ‘summer’ in Russian. When Oleg and Alex came up with the name 2.5 years ago, the idea behind it was that clients should sit down and relax, sipping a lovely summer cocktail (sometimes, literally), while the team are doing all the hard work designing and building a product.

Back then, a synergy of summer and playfulness were communicated through a warm colour palette and beach iconography (palm tree and parasol). The brand was instantly recognisable and found it’s home amongst the sandbox that is London’s tech scene.

 

 

As we started taking on more work, growing as a team (we’re now 15 and counting!) and looking across international waters, we felt it might be time to revisit what makes us uniquely Leto.

We wanted a refresh whilst maintaining our playful attitude towards agency life, and some subtle references to our original look.

Our brainstorming process revealed that we wanted our current clients/industry peers to be able to recognise us from our logo. We all agreed to keep the circle shape of our old logo and the red(ish) colour palette. We also knew that our new branding should reflect our passion and the way we get things done – through discovery, curiosity, collaboration, learning, and innovation.

The vision was clear, but apart from that it was fair game, and the team left it to me to bring it to life.

I spent a few weeks (simultaneously working on client projects) trying to freeform as many different concepts as possible. I wanted to show as many concepts as I could to the rest of the team and start creating conversations.

Below you will see some of the initial ideas. Most of them weren’t finished (some aren’t even very good), but I thought I’d share them with you, as they were part of the journey for our rebrand.

 

 

As you can see there was a lot of references to warm hues and the containing of elements brought forward from our previous logo. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I wanted the logo to be clean and subtle similar to Buffer or Apple, or to be a bright and vibrant mark. The brief did state that the logo needed to retain a similar colour palette to the original logo, but Design 101 is to always challenge the brief.

The team were curious to see all the concepts, so everyone kept distracting me sneakily peeking into my screens. It was clear a second team sit down was needed. We all got together, discussed the logos and our feelings about each of them, then voted for the ones we wanted to take further. So together we decided on the direction we wanted to move with logo, which made the job slightly easier for me.

I began to get closer and closer (the pixelated box near the middle of the image above really connected with the team) and kept iterating on it until I came up with the final logo you see today. The original logo was updated with some bright complementing colours whilst retaining hints to the original red circle. We accomplished this by ‘demaking’ the circle into a pixelated version and updating the red with a more visually pleasing orange, complemented with turquoise.

 

 

Our Summer is now reflected in the logo through an abstract sunset in the logo mark. The pixels form a puzzle communicating our curiosity and discovery; also reflecting our collaborative and holistic approach, while keeping an eye on details that form a whole.

We wanted the pixel aesthetic to carry forward into the website itself and so focused on a card style interface, which allowed for large clear statements, a focus on big beautiful photographs (captured by me), and responsiveness for tablet and mobile, executed by Renat.

 

 

 

We wanted to experiment with the menu positioning on our website rather than just defaulting to a top menu, and were very inspired by the side menu used on Medium.

The logo itself carries forward into the styling of our marketing materials including business cards, proposals, pdfs and social content.

 

 

We made a choice to use a round sans serif font for our copy as it connotes a warm, friendly, approachable tone of voice. We work with both startups and larger enterprises, so needed a tone which would work perfectly for both.

Our vision is to deliver pixel perfect digital products for our clients whilst retaining a warm and creative culture within the agency.

We all loved working on the rebrand – be it brainstorming, designing, developing, or optimising for mobile screens. Most importantly, the feedback so far has been very positive, and inspired our clients to dare to experiment and be more open about innovating with their own products.

P.S. After all the hard work we think the team deserves a nice little party… Rebrand Party! Where we’d be more than happy to welcome Leto’s friends, colleagues, and clients. Watch out our and pages – more info coming soon!