Holborn - Created by Nomad

Making reinsurance sexi-er

This privately held reinsurance company dates back almost 100 years. Their success is a strong testament to their reputation within the industry, but as the firm approached its Centennial, they decided they needed to update their brand. I started with a logo refresh, including a new brand standards manual, created a whole new suite of collateral materials and a new B2B advertising campaign.

Capabilities

Design

Branding

A new brand

A complete rebrand begins with a new identity. Holborn’s strong reputation in the industry made them hesitant to stray too far from their old mark, but they did agree they needed a new icon to liven up their simple sans-serif font.

Round One: Initial Concepts

I explored several different ideas that spoke to a few of the strong characteristics of Hoborn’s personality:

Growth: Over their 100-year history, Holborn had solid, continued growth
Individualized Attention: They custom tailor their products per client
Teamwork: the company is 100% employee owned, so everyone has a stake in the outcome.

Round Two

The client ultimately felt that the Teamwork theme spoke best to what they wanted to convey about their company, and in reality it encompassed the important aspects of the other two themes. With that, they narrowed down the chosen concepts to three they felt worked the best.

Color exploration

Once the client landed on a final choice, I explored different color options that would help them appear to be a more contemporary company. Ultimately, however, the client felt they should keep the red from their current logo, so I built a new palette around that.

Building the brand standards

After an exhaustive exploratory, the client felt they needed fonts that looked contemporary, but were still fairly conservative. With over 400 employees all responsible for producing different materials, they also needed fonts that would play nicely with everyone’s operating systems. A tall order. Google fonts ended up having exactly what we needed.

Next came the collateral pieces

A brand new logo means you also need brand new office stationery as well as a revamp of your brochures, newsletters and other marketing materials.

The advertising campaign

Holborn felt the themes we explored in the logo development phase would work really well to build an advertising campaign around, so we created ads that spoke to the different aspects of their company that would appeal to their clients: other insurance agencies.