Rein­vent PHOENIX

As a design and inno­va­tion stu­dio, we have a decades-long his­to­ry of trans­form­ing our part­ners — but no mat­ter how much expe­ri­ence you have, trans­form­ing your­self is always the most sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge (believe us). But we had no oth­er choice, we have to keep our fin­ger on the pulse of the future. We have to make our inner devel­op­ment vis­i­ble to the out­side world and put it into words. So, we did it. And rein­vent­ed ourselves.

PHOENIX was found­ed on a warm sum­mer night in 1987 by Andreas Haug and Tom Schön­herr on a boat. A lot has changed since then: the com­pa­ny is more promi­nent, the design mar­ket is more com­plex, and very few of our meet­ings take place on boats. Nev­er­the­less, we don’t want to lose our roots amidst all the changes — is that pos­si­ble? Future and past in harmony?

Com­pa­nies like ours that have devel­oped organ­i­cal­ly over a long peri­od often lack clar­i­ty in their charis­ma at some point. What exact­ly is the quin­tes­sence of this col­lec­tive, this brand? So, our rein­ven­tion process fol­lowed this guid­ing prin­ci­ple: we want to be clear. About what we are, what we do and why we do it — and where we want to go. We want to give our part­ners ori­en­ta­tion in a time of ambi­gu­i­ty. We want to enrich people’s lives.

For the appear­ance of our brand image, this means a con­sis­tent reduc­tion to the essen­tials while strength­en­ing emo­tion­al­i­ty and close­ness. Sounds like a damn com­plex chal­lenge? We thought so too. And those who know us also know our answer in such sit­u­a­tions: Collaboration.

Our new visu­al iden­ti­ty results from a syn­er­gy of dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives: PHOENIX feat. STU­DIO LZ. What hap­pens when two design stu­dios join forces? Hori­zons are broad­ened, focus is sharp­ened. By bring­ing togeth­er our dif­fer­ent ways of think­ing, we expand­ed the bound­aries of our cre­ativ­i­ty and achieved the Pare­to opti­mum of func­tion­al­i­ty and appearance.

Our Man­ag­ing Part­ner Andreas Diefen­bach is con­vinced that the col­lab­o­ra­tion was the key to an extra­or­di­nary out­come: “The col­lab­o­ra­tion with STU­DIO LZ made us think beyond. It real­ly revealed new magic”.

And the result? You are look­ing at it right now. For one thing, you are read­ing a red arti­cle: Since red has always been our colour, we decid­ed to be even more con­sis­tent with it. Our new red is warmer, stronger, brighter. And it is every­where. Arti­cles, let­ters, pre­sen­ta­tions — we speak in red. Clear, emo­tion­al, consistent.

Speak­ing of clear — our new font, Extrasets “Klarheit Grotesk” by Alex Dujet, appears graph­i­cal­ly as to the point as the for­mu­la­tions it visu­alis­es — a time­less form of expres­sion whose con­trast is fur­ther enhanced by the inter­play between Reg­u­lar and Bold Italic.

The visu­al lan­guage is also an ele­men­tary com­po­nent of our cor­po­rate iden­ti­ty — it deter­mines the close­ness of our cul­ture, includ­ing its per­son­al­i­ties, as well as our work and how it can be expe­ri­enced. Indi­vid­u­al­i­ty, emo­tions and live­li­ness are con­veyed through warm light­ing moods, shad­ow play and intense colours. But what should we write about pic­tures here when they can speak for them­selves — just look through our web­site a bit.

One part of a cor­po­rate iden­ti­ty that should be remem­bered is how a com­pa­ny express­es itself as a col­lec­tive. In the past, our com­mu­ni­ca­tion was very depen­dent on the indi­vid­u­als com­mu­ni­cat­ing. But because we believe in radi­at­ing a col­lec­tive per­son­al­i­ty as an agency, we have worked with copy­writer Stephan Park to devel­op a style of lan­guage that reflects us. What does it feel like? About like the arti­cle you are read­ing right now.

Friends, we can tell you: rebrand­ing your­self is intense. Some­times exhaust­ing, maybe even painful. But it was worth it, don’t you think?