We are excited to unveil a refreshed brand identity and brand family for Samuel Associates. This update represents a significant evolution of our company since its founding in 2015. This change was not taken lightly, and our marketing team spent months ideating, designing, and documenting a brand identity that would meet our overarching goals.

A new family of brands

Our rebranding efforts were sparked by a change and expansion in our corporate organization. Samuel Associates continues to be a trusted advisor to many influential businesses and organizations in strategy, lobbying and marketing.

In response to increasing interest from worldwide high-tech companies in Canada, a new company called Samuel Technologies will now offer international technology partners and companies from the U.S., U.K., Europe and elsewhere an opportunity to validate, market and demonstrate Information Technology (IT) and Information Management (IM) solutions to customers in the Canadian government sector and commercial industry.

For added synergy, Samuel Associates and Samuel Technologies will be organized and represented by the Samuel Group of Companies.

The goal of this branding exercise was to ensure that the identity of the brand was distinct and recognizable, but with enough room to grow into a trusted brand family.

Setting clear goals for our redesign

To ensure our goals were defined from the start, we began by outlining a creative brief, which I briefly touched up above. At a high level, our brief was:

This overarching brief guided our design and ideation process, and gave us a strong foundation to conduct a review of our current brand identity.

The review of our current branding revealed several potential areas for improvement, including within our typography and layout. It also gave us some insight into the limitations and solutions for when it came to developing a cohesive set of logos and branding.

Same values, new identity

While this rebrand represents a significant development, our core values and beliefs haven't changed. It was important that this rebrand reflected the nature of this change as an evolution, rather than a revolution. We wanted to ensure that, despite our shift, our clients still understood that our founding principles remain untouched.

We began the process by ideating and looking for possible designs and solutions that would showcase the shift of our brand. This process allowed us to identify what the core components of our brand were, and what we wanted to carry forward with this redesign. Our iconic torch being the most pivotal component.

Based on this ideation stage, we were able to design and agree upon a set of logos that we felt matched our brief.

The first of several options was selected, and the Samuel Group of Companies officially had a new brand with both light and dark logo variations (as well as new slack emojis to keep the company spirit in our day-to-day chats).

Documenting and standardizing

The previous brand did not have much in the way of documentation and standardization. We knew what our brand font was, and we knew what a rough colour palette looked like, but we had little to no guidelines when it came to designing assets for the brand. For this reason, we spent time identifying a cohesive, brand-wide design system in Figma to help us achieve and maintain consistency in our communications.

Moving ahead towards new horizons

Our rebrand marks a significant milestone in the growth of this organization. Through this process, we have a cemented a new direction for the company as we continue to move forward in helping current and future industry leaders in their own efforts to grow.

‍