Bernard

We iden­ti­fied their Sin­gle Most Impor­tant Thing (aka SMIT) as ​“A Mod­ern Lega­cy”: bring­ing a sto­ried brand into a new era of growth and innovation. 

As a brand ​“refresh,” the Bernard team knew there was a lot of their pre­vi­ous iden­ti­ty they want­ed to main­tain. The gold palette was a help­ful dif­fer­en­tia­tor in their indus­try and the spark ele­ment felt right but lacked refine­ment. How­ev­er, their iden­ti­ty did need a more robust visu­al iden­ti­ty that could help Bernard estab­lish more uni­fied visu­als, from dig­i­tal pres­ence to phys­i­cal products.

In explor­ing how to best mod­ern­ize the Bernard lock­up while retain­ing its her­itage, we iden­ti­fied two key areas to improve. The spark mark had too many small points that got lost at small­er scales, and the hor­i­zon­tal line through the word­mark left awk­ward rem­nants of a few let­ters (such as the mid­dle cross­bar of the E). 

In order to bring a cut­ting-edge touch to the iden­ti­ty, we explored a num­ber of sans serif logo­type options that evoke feel­ings of strength, moder­ni­ty, and indus­try. The wide-set let­ter­forms project strength, while the round­ed coun­ters feel famil­iar and mod­er­ate amongst a sea of over­ly-strong com­peti­tor brands.

We refined the spark to be read­able at a small size and add some ener­gy to the sys­tem. By sep­a­rat­ing the spark from the B, we cre­at­ed three dis­tinct logo options: a logo­mark, a logo­type, and a lockup.

To con­tin­ue with the con­sis­tent theme of struc­ture and strength, we want­ed a sim­i­lar­ly mighty type­face to play the role of the pri­ma­ry. Erbaum is a sort of ​“slab sans serif” that leans heav­i­ly into indus­tri­al over­tones. Lever­ag­ing the type­face in all caps gives a very strong, stur­dy, and indus­tri­al look to the type system.

Hel­veti­ca Neue is Bernard’s sec­ondary type­face. It exudes a sense of pro­fes­sion­al­ism and reli­a­bil­i­ty. Its clean, geo­met­ric lines con­vey a mod­ern yet time­less aesthetic. 

While there are years of equi­ty in the exist­ing Bernard col­or palette, we want­ed to slight­ly sim­pli­fy and add an addi­tion­al val­ue into the fold. Alloy, Bond, Car­bide, Cur­rent, and Base are all cur­rent Bernard col­ors, but there was a desire to see a jolt of vibran­cy and val­ue in the iden­ti­ty — and that’s where Spark comes in. The feel­ing of a spe­cif­ic com­po­si­tion can change based on cer­tain col­or com­bi­na­tions, pro­vid­ing great flex­i­bil­i­ty. For exam­ple, the com­bi­na­tion of Spark and Alloy cre­ates an intense and mod­ern impres­sion, where­as Bond and Base togeth­er are more mod­ern and timeless.

To build out the visu­al iden­ti­ty fur­ther, we includ­ed two tex­tures to enhance com­po­si­tions: Alloy and Grip. Rather than take an over­ly aggres­sive approach with scuffed and scratched met­al, the Alloy tex­ture show­cas­es the indus­tri­al land­scape of Bernard while still being clean, approach­able, and pre­cise. The Grip tex­ture – made up of the repeat­ing dia­monds seen on indus­tri­al grips – is a nat­ur­al way to incor­po­rate Bernard’s prod­ucts into the visu­al language.

There are a lot of mov­ing pieces to a brand roll­out, but luck­i­ly our Brand Sup­port team are experts. We worked with Bernard on updat­ing their prod­uct box­es with the new iden­ti­ty, tak­ing spe­cial con­sid­er­a­tion of how Tre­gakiss fits with Bernard. We also tack­led pro­mo­tion­al posters, spec sheets, and pre­sen­ta­tion decks — key ele­ments for Bernard’s day-to-day operations.