Challenge
To rebrand our own project: we couldn’t be more elated when the client trusted us again to completely revamp the company’s brand.
Story starter. Branding
WG Forge has always been different, but the visuals didn’t fully reflect this uniqueness and vibe. This used to be a quite familiar style, featuring a rocket flying high in the sky — just like other training courses out there. Black and white with splashes of red, there was a feeling of grayness outside, but hidden inside, colorful energy, strength, and movement. The task was to stand out from the crowd by creating fresh, recognizable and engaging branding that appeals to a young audience, with a pinch of fun to make people want to explore it more.
Branding Solution
We decided to start with the most essential part, the very heart of it all — the logo. We drew 17 completely different logos, and in the end, the client ended up choosing the simplest and the most meaningful one.
Another idea was to make the key elements (identity elements, branded icons, fonts, etc.) that could work together to create a tuneful system while being self-sufficient and recognizable separately.
What about the colors? We wanted to avoid limiting ourselves to specific colors for the logo and other style elements. The goal was to give the brand a sense of liveliness and freshness, so we kept our options open. However, we did use a split-complementary color system to guide the color choices.
To showcase the different course subjects, we created icons for each one of them. They are like mini-branding elements all on their own. You can even use them like emojis in a messaging app — just pop them into your text to emphasize important words or phrases. In total, we drew more than 100 pieces 🙂
The whole story started to come together!
Story development. Rebranding
The brand has seen rapid growth and has become much stronger, with clear pillars and a wider, more diverse and mature audience. The company came to us with a task to reflect these main pillars (career evolution, leading game dev society, feeling the presence, culture of listening) as well as a desire to demonstrate its brand & audience changes and add more confidence to their style.
Rebranding Solution
We needed to move away from the fluid bubble designs and create a new, more mature narrative. We achieved this by focusing on simple shapes and bold typography, as well as adjusting the color scheme. These changes helped to give the brand a more professional and sophisticated look.
We came up with new geometric shapes and made simplified versions of the icons:
- Lead with us → a progressive motion→ an arrow.
- Feel with us → the sense organs → a flower made of 5 circles (and there is one circle in the middle — the sixth sense).
- Grow with us → a ladder intentionally made uneven → not everything always goes step by step.
- Speak with us → two bubbles like in a messenger conversation.
We also began experimenting to revamp the design, played around with typography and introduced new, more solid shades to the color palette. Rather than flashy green, we opted for dusty gray, pink, and complex orange, along with other mixed colors.
The icons were reborn as stickers.
Just as a capsule wardrobe consists of versatile, essential pieces that can be mixed and matched, this design capsule consists of the key elements that can be adapted and recombined in various ways.
Afterword
Even though both designs are stylish, the first one was difficult to combine, if you are not a professional designer — it turned out to be too particular, while the second one was more clear.
This is the story of how WG Forge went from playful bubbles to bold shapes and confident lines. We had a blast working on this project and are thrilled with the final result. We hope you will enjoy the new look as much as we do!
