Rebranding edyoucated: Empowering people to build the skills of their future

After months of reflection, strategizing, and dozens of iterations, today we’re proud to announce the new brand identity of edyoucated. You might have already seen some of it on our social media and website. Or if you’re already learning with edyoucated, you might have even noticed the fresh coloring of our web app.

And while our name won’t change, we’ve upgraded the whole brand identity to a new level: a brand new logo, characteristic fonts, and meaningful colors that reflect who we are and the future of learning that we’re building.

So why did we start this journey in the first place?

When we started edyoucated in 2019, we actually just wanted to get started. So we've hired a great freelancer to create basic branding assets: a logo, colors, basic fonts. At that time it was a rather pragmatic decision without too much overthinking.

But as many of you know, when a startup grows the quantity of branded assets explodes. Sometimes it grows on purpose, sometimes accidentally along the way (”hey, let’s build a quick social media visual for that post that launches in 30 minutes”). This approach contained resulted in lots of great ideas, but lacked strategy: often not fully reflecting about how we want to communicate, what actually represents our identity best, and what’s the right "tone of voice" for our target groups.

We felt our spirit of empowering people to unleash their full potential could definitely be better communicated.

So a few months ago we’ve started the process of looking into our brand, defining what we want to communicate and how that could look like in practice. We worked together with external experts, with our internal team, with our clients, and with our learners. We asked questions that don’t have easy answers. We started deep conversations on big questions like “Why are we doing this?” and “What do we believe in?” to get to the very core of edyoucated.

And after gathering all the impressions, our founders finally sat together right before Christmas to ultimately decide what proposal represents edyoucated best.

This is what I want to show you today.

Building a brand that truly reflects what we stand for

At edyoucated, we envision a world in which people are empowered to unleash their full potential. A world, in which organizations and individuals can continuously adapt and innovate through effective skill-based learning. Because learning makes us succeed. Learning fosters curiosity. Learning makes us open-minded.

We believe the diversity of people's skills and learning goals is what makes our world strong. And thus, it shouldn't be neglected – but embraced. Through personalized learning experiences focused on someone truly special: you.

For us, this is more than a vision statement. It’s how we work, it’s what we believe in, and it’s how we build the next-generation of learning solutions.

We build our brand on the solid foundations of this vision. Branding isn’t just about the visual identity. It’s not just the logo or the colors. Branding allows us to build relationships with the people we care about: with our learners, with our clients, with potential new team members and with the general public.

Along with this vision comes a set of closely connected core ideas:

We stand for growth and scale – both on a personal level for every individual learner. But also for the many organizations we’re supporting on their journey towards growing the skills of their workforce.

We stand for guidance. Today, too many people are still drowning in learning content, but starving for guidance. We believe it’s time for a new generation of skill building that gives clear guidance on the relevant roles, skills, and learning materials – individually tailored for organizations and learners alike.

We stand for inclusive and rewarding learning experiences. We bring back the you into education by building a learner-centric product, by fighting one-size-fits-all learning, and by starting with your unique skill goals, prior knowledge, and learning styles. We celebrate our learners’ achievements.

Logo

In the process it was quickly clear that our name still represents our fundamental ideas very well. Yet, we felt our visual identity, including logo and colors, could do better.

We wanted it to truly reflect the values mentioned above, combining an educational character with our idea of modern skill building. And most importantly, reflecting this fundamental idea of personal growth, scale, and guidance.

The brand idea starts with a basic geometric idea: the circle. You could think of these circle as skills, but it’s more than that. It’s a metaphor for scale, for personal growth, clearly guiding.

When adding the basic geometric idea with our colors, they naturally form a gradient again emphasizing this idea of (skill) growth. Our serif typeface adds lots of character, and a bit of educational flavor.

Typefaces

The new edyoucated brand introduces two distinct fonts:

You’ve already seen the first one in our logo. It’s called Epicene and our team immediately fell in love with it. Not just because it adds so much character, but also because the story of its creation resonates beautifully with the inclusive core value (see above): it’s been created as a gender-neutral typeface (if you want to learn more, make sure to check out the amazing blogpost by its creators here). Epicene will be used for bold headings. For strong claims. For titles and marketing assets.

The second typeface is for the product and body text. It’s called Inter. It’s extremely flexible and very readable even on small digital screens, allowing us to create clear and guiding experiences for our users.

Colors

We decided to create our color palette both with the idea of growth in mind, but also designing for a calm and clear learning environment. An environment that removes distraction and lets you concentrate on the most important things while learning.

The new edyoucated design system is based on a three core colors:

Our primary “Malachite” which guides your through the next best skill and rewards you after completing it. It’s complemented by “Eucalyptus” and “Cerulean”, acting as calming element for illustrations and other visual product elements. Together they form a unique gradient from blue to green colors that will be used across different assets going forward.

A special addition for our product will be a warm “Seashell” background color. Explicitly designed for longer learning sessions and helping you to not get tired eyes by looking at the bright, clean white color of your digital screens.

Ready, Set, Action!

Every brand only comes to life “in the wild”. Thus, we’re glad for all the wonderful opportunities that this new brand identity provides for our teams, clients, and learners. You can already experience some of the brand assets live in practice; some others follow in the next weeks and months. Below you can find a handful of examples to give you an idea of how this will look like.

The people behind building our brand

...branding isn’t only created by designers and marketers.
It’s is created by all of us, every single one of you interacting with it on a daily basis.

There are so many people involved here that I unfortunately can’t name them all. Yet, a few people deserve a special shout out here. Brando Vasquez, our dedicated brand designer, who has kicked off the entire project, helped with the immersion and did a great job on the visual identity. Our Product Design Lead Gaétan who just joined in December and immediately jumped on that project to translate the theory into practice, built a design system from scratch, and is now busy bringing it into every corner of our product experience. Our Product Designer Sara who contributed tons of feedback and ideas along all these iterations. Our Web Designer & Developer Nikita, who not only contributed a lot to the strategic direction, but also translated it to our website. And finally our entire product team, including all engineers making the launch work smoothly and delivering on the date that we already set months ago.

Yet, of course branding isn’t only created by designers and marketers. It’s is created by all of us, every single one of you interacting with it on a daily basis. It’s the way we are perceived. It’s how we talk to clients and how clients talk to us. It’s how we talk to applicants in the hiring process and how they talk to us. It’s how we write emails. And it’s how we build products and how we care about our users.

So given what you’ve seen today, we’re so much looking forward to see it live in action, see all of you interact with it, and see it blossom and evolve in the next months.