Material Security. Building Radical Resilience.
Challenge
Partnered with co-founders and Head of Marketing to create a new brand for the startup’s launch out of stealth. The presidential election of 2016 pointed out the flaws in one of our most ubiquitous technologies—email. Our mailboxes are filled to the brim with personal and business information, links to other accounts, and are open to various different forms of attacks. The founding team at Material Security saw this as an opportunity to take a radically new approach to solving these problems. In a truly collaborative approach, Emotive Brand worked with the Material team to bring their brand to life. We partnered to define the brand strategy, name, visual identity, and their new website. Backed by iconic investors and venture capital groups, Material launched out of stealth with an impressive list of customers. Their products and brand are setting a new standard for how security companies break into the market.
Solution
What We Learned Along the Way Building Radical Resilience. The core idea of Material is about taking a radical approach to building resilience against email breaches and attacks. We found opportunities to highlight how they take ubiquitous tools and use them in unexpected ways to accomplish this goal. Fostering a new understanding of email security. People think they understand email, but they often overlook its importance in our digital lives. We created a visual system that uses diagrams to explain commonly misunderstood concepts and makes Material’s unique approach to security easy to grasp. Don’t say you’re different. Show it. The security industry is filled with brands that rely on black and white photos, illustrations of masks and shields, and messaging filled with fear tactics to make emotional connections with its audiences. Material took a hopeful and helpful approach to their brand in a way that lets the product be the hero. An Inside-Out Approach to the Logo Working from the idea of ‘Radical Resilience’, we wanted to make sure the Material logo showed how they approach email security from the inside-out and scale across organizations. In order to reference their use of ubiquitous tools in unexpected ways, we worked from simple geometry to make an iconic and simple logo. Balancing Brand and Product Material provides their customers unprecedented visibility and control over their email systems. Showcasing the product and the problem it solves were a key focus. We used simplified UI and abstract visuals rooted in scientific schematics to break complex problems down to their core components and reconstruct the narrative together for the viewer. A Powerfully Simple Brand System Everything in the system is rooted in fundamentals. This guided all of our choices from diagram construction, typeface selection, iconography, and color system. Simple geometry found in the logo, typeface, and illustrations, paired with a restrained color system based on RGB are the foundational elements of the Material visual system. Services Provided Brand Strategy Positioning Visual Identity Naming Copywriting Collateral Design Brand Guidelines UX/UI Design Content Strategy
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