Brand identity for a global media agency with a focus on humanity.

Engine came to me with an unusual soup to nuts agency rebrand request—”Our primary audience is current and future employees.” Their existing brand felt cold, corporate and confusing. We did a full strategic immersion to redefine their values around finding and retaining talent, and landed on a brand that feels inclusive, ingenious and human all at once—and also stands out in a very crowded market ranging from creative agencies to consulting firms.

The Big Village logo is a bold, unexpected and welcoming mark representative of their unique people-first mentality. Built from basic shapes (squares, circles and triangles), it represents both the building blocks used to create solutions, and the diverse and fun combinations that can derive from working together. As such, the logo also exists in multiple stacked formations to allow for usage across an extensive range of needs.

The design system is directly inspired by the logo, built on a dynamic but flexible approach to color, typography, design and photography. The color palette is organic and warm, meant to evoke elements of nature in an imagined utopian village: forest, sky, earth, sun. Neue Plak was chosen for the primary typeface for its bold cap connection to the wordmark, but also for it’s unique provenance as a typeface developed by two type designers together. Calluna and special pops of Polysans Median round out the brand’s varied needs.

The logo elements become fodder for a variety of icons and patterns, featuring the distinctive “i’s” as abstracted representations of people. To take it one step further, a limited use case monogram, featuring a rotated B and an upside down V, come together to form the outline of a series of structures akin to homes, a literal village.