Geneco – Sustainable Waste Solutions

The challenge

Our challenge was to create a visual personality that demonstrates GENeco is an organisation of thought leaders who are offering ground breaking services improving both the planet and their clients’ bank balances. They have forged a unique space in the waste and environmental sector not only as a sustainable option, but as an approachable, human centred company who offer fantastic customer service. They needed our help to make sure their communications visually reflect their business values. 

Our solution

1. Defining the audience

To redefine the visual personality and their digital presence we needed to understand who they are talking to. We worked closely with the GENeco team to identify a set of audience personas, based on their in depth knowledge of their customer base. These personas were a constant point of reference for the team to help qualify decisions, and make sure the new direction was speaking to the right people in the right way. Real world audience representatives were recruited for workshops to make sure our audience hypothesis were tested and validated. The personas were used extensively for both for the UX workshops and for the visual personality discovery workshops.

2. Developing a visual personality

The second part of the discovery phase was to clearly define how GENeco wanted to be perceived externally. This took the form of a workshop focused on personifying GENeco the business with human personality traits in order to identify the organisational personality they wanted to communicate.We constantly referred back to the audience personas to make sure that our plans would resonate with their target audience.

The workshops provided a forum for healthy discussion for the GENeco team, and ensured that consensus over the direction was achieved and that everyone was on board and had a say in the direction the ship was sailing.

Following the workshops, we created a range of mood-boards which translated our findings into a visual language and explored tone of voice options that could be discussed and voted on. A process of refinement followed, taking elements of different routes, and improving until the right solution was realised. A final mood board was then presented which recorded the stylistic elements for the new look and feel and tone of voice for GENeco.

3. Creative application

Having established the design principles for the look and feel, we needed to define the individual elements so that the visual personality could be rolled out in a consistent manner across marketing collateral moving forward. This meant the creation of a colour palette, selecting appropriate font styles and creating an illustration style.

Illustration became a key communication tool for the new direction as it allowed the otherwise dirty and often unattractive waste machinery to be simplified, cleaned up and made more visually appealing. This also supported the company personality of being fun, whilst remaining professional and  cutting edge.

We combined all the elements together in our design of the website interface for the GENeco website. We can’t wait to see the result once the build is complete!

The impact

The identity we’ve created will provide a strong foundation for the future – ensuring that GENeco’s marketing presence is consistently in tune with the needs of their audience, and reflects their great company personality. The new website is not yet launched, but with the positive reception from GENeco we’re hoping for great things – watch this space.