Appreciate Rebranding Project

Appreciate is a social commerce platform designed to help people curate and showcase their most meaningful possessions, turning the "stuff" we own into a digital portfolio of our unique styles.

As part of the team at Appreciate, I worked to re-define what it means to marry a technology and fashion focused brand.

Appreciates brand was in dire need of a refresh. It no longer aligned with the company’s goals, ideals, or the target demographic’s aesthetic expectations. We needed something that could convey our scrappy start up foundation and immerging web3 technology, allow us to strongly position ourselves to potential investors, and speak to the fashion audience we intended to target.

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Quick Summary

Problem
The Appreciate brand no longer positioned the company as a tech innovator and leader in the fashion industry.

Solution
As part of the team at Appreciate, I worked to re-imagined the visual identity, rethinking how it looked, felt, and spoke to better reflect our company’s innovation at the intersection of technology and fashion.

Full Breakdown

We approached the rebranding with a comprehensive design process, beginning with ideation, brainstorming, sketching, and multiple iterations, and culminating in the production of various assets for the new brand.

Ideation began with exploring symbolism, lettermarks, and how we wanted to convey Appreciate. Through this “make stuff” process we defined a the foundational aspects of the brand and who we wanted to brand towards, Brands, Fashion Owners, Fashion Items, Web3 Technology. Each element of these 4 had intersections with the others and defined further what Appreciate was and provided.

Defining Appreciate

For Owners and Items, the most important tenant was “proof of ownership.” For Brands and Web3 it was “luxury shoppers.” Each pairing brought more nuance and rational to the overall idea of appreciate and sparked the exploration of connection. Appreciate’s platform at its core was about connecting people, brands, products & technology.

With this idea in mind we started to focus and hone the visualization of Appreciate’s championing of connection. This lead to an exploration of shape mosaics utilizing letter forms and geometry. We honed this down to a few flower and weaving like marks. After we culled down the marks to a selection of stand outs, we started to explore the typography in relation to those marks.

Typography matchmaking

To fit with the tech-focused aesthetic of appreciate, we sought out a clean and modern sans serif font with a touch of character. After exploring various options, we selected Maison Neue as our typeface of choice. This versatile font works exceptionally well in the digital space and adds a unique touch to the overall brand identity.


We explored many pairings and experimented with a mix of high fashion serif fonts as well as tech focused sans serifs. Ultimately, we selected Nuezeit Grotesk for its clean and modern tech aesthetic with a touch of character and nuance to bring in our fashion industry influences. We opted to pair it with the web font Maison Neue for its strong digital readability.

Having selected our brand typeface we could move on to finalizing our new logo lockup. Using Nuezeit as the foundation we hand crafted our Appreciate wordmark to refine it towards our tech fashion identity.

Pulling it all together

We decided to move forward with the 4 cross section clover for our logo mark. This decision prompted the creation of a design tenant we dubbed The Rule of Four.

With the new logo locked in, it was time to refine our new brands color palette, iconography, illustrations and pattern designs.

Color Palette

Color palette was the first item on the list to refine. This was also the first area we applied The Rule of Four. We built out 4 vibrant primary colors, based on 4 gems, that aimed to identify the primary audience of the content being highlighted. It was important for us to be bold with these tones, making a statement as many fashion icons do.

Primary Palette


Once we identified the foundational colors we started to pair them with an accent and tie them to specific content areas. The Appreciate focused colors would be Stay Dynamic purple, and Stay Ambitious green. For content focused on owners, we paired Feeling Confident green with Feeling Joy peach. For Partners we paired Always Optimistic yellow with Always Splendid purple. Lastly we paired Be Inspired red with Be Grateful coffee to search as a utility content combination.

Extended Primary Palette


As we built out the extended palette, it became imperative for a set of colors that allowed for dynamism, as well as softer contrasting notes. Being a constantly changing industry on both fronts we hoped to serve, we wanted something that could flex and easily compliment the primary vibrant tones without taking the spotlight in the process.

Extended Accent Palette

Defining The Extended Visual Identity

With the color palette locked in, all that was left was to bring the brand to life. We developed two illustrations styles to live within the app, and the website experiences. We crafted a set of UI icons to make each of our touchpoints feel uniquely our own. Lastly we built out a pattern library to bring nuance and a luxury fashion feel to our brand experience that ties back to many iconic brands seen in the industry today.

In App & Website Illustrations

Mosaic Pattern Library

Pulling it all together

Conclusion

Through many months of hard work and hundreds of ideas that didn’t see the light of day, we finished our new Appreciate identity. It was an extremely rewarding project, that challenged me many times as a designer to push past what I thought I could accomplish and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Sometimes the best design work comes from being just uncomfortable enough to try something new.