On the surface Kintone is a customizable workspace and toolkit that quickly connects, organizes, and visualizes information and workflow so progressive teams are more synchronized and business is more efficient. While the product is great for company workflows and efficiency, it lacked warmth. So I wanted to see if the idea of "data" and "love" could coexist.
What developed was an amazingly warm and approachable brand that stands out in a sea of stale, corporate competition. The mark uses dimensional building blocks to represent toolkits and customization. For love, I explored many ways to represent love: fun, carefree, family, warmth, but ultimately came back to the most ubiquitous symbol, the heart.
Beyond the logo, photography and typography became the biggest elements of the visual brand. To provide flexibility, I wanted to use two kinds of imagery: business focused and fun. The business focused ones needed to feel positive though. The people in the imagery needed to effectively portray warmth. The second kind of imagery were the fun ones. In that I wanted to push the aesthetic with unexpected, and sometimes silly, imagery to contrast what we saw with the competition.
Kintone Red is a major element of the brand because it so effectively communicates "heart". But the brand needed to be bright and inclusive. To that end, I created a secondary palette that could be used as an accent in communications.
But that palette became very important to capture a very unique aspect of the brand: animals. The Japanese parent company of Kintone uses animals for internal communications and is personal, but still relevant element. So I used the secondary color and animal photography (looking a bit silly) to create the poster art below.
