Lightspeed Brand Refresh

Client: Lightspeed Commerce
Description: Brand refresh
Role: Creative Director, APAC
Services: Project Lead | Design Lead

Lightspeed’s original identity was developed in 2014 by global advertising agency Cossette for a single retail product, OnSite. 

Since then, we had acquired 12 companies, launched four new flagship products (Retail, Restaurant, eCom & Golf) and pivoted our positioning to focus on high GTV customers.

It was time to evolve our brand to feel more premium and sophisticated and expand our toolkit so we can produce continuously fresh, modern creative.

How did we do it?

Global Teams:
Our Group Creative Director
and I decided to break up our global design org into teams
to help tackle the core parts of our brand. These became the Typography, Graphic Devices, Colour, Illustration and Application teams.

Asynchronous design:
We really made the most of
working across multiple timezones by implementing asynchronous design and communication. Each team would work through a set amount of tasks and leave what
was left to be picked up by the next group of designers in a different timezone. This was
only possible when we would clearly communicate our tasks
and project status.

Accountability:
With so many designers taking
part in this global exercise,
we decided to establish leaders within each team to help keep members accountable. Each leader would also be responsible for updating the wider team on progress and status which would help provide teams with visibility across explorations and design solutions.

Non Destructive workflows:
I did my best to remind teams
to not delete or remove any inspiration, designs or explorations. The goal was to maintain a non destructive design file where we could walk through different design directions, territories and solutions that were explored. I also encouraged designers to jump into different team files to gain inspiration and potentially discover solutions for other problems they would be designing for.

Making decisions and sticking to your guns!

My most important and difficult role
in the brand revamp exercise was maintaining a close eye on development in each team and knowing what direction (in and among the chaos/noise) was going to yield us the best results.

Picking the best from each team meant that there had to be some tweaks and adjustments in order to make them
all fit together and provide clear rationale for non-designers to understand our concepts and thinking. With multiple stakeholder presentations and feedback sessions, we finally arrived on a set of guidelines which
we still pushed and stretched to better suit our brand direction.

Guidelines for designers and non-designers.

After some lengthy approvals, the team were able to confidently construct guidelines to help establish our final outcome and instructions on how designers can use our graphic devices, colours,
type etc.

We also used this opportunity to update our brand guidelines that were accessible both internally and externally. This meant that the team had to update our existing media assets like logos, icons etc.

Internal Sizzle Reels

And when it came time to the grand reveal to the wider company, we decided to produce a sizzle reel that would highlight some of the major changes coming and help generate some excitement. This was also a great way of getting the team the exposure they deserved globally as each and every designer helped contribute to the latest iteration of the Lightpeed brand.