Over the last six months, we've been quietly at work on a new logo, which you'll now see more or less everywhere we are. Perhaps unusually for a bank, we're extremely passionate about design‍—‌and wanted to lift the hood a bit to share the process behind the redesign.

The Griffin logo was originally designed by Johnson Banks, with whom we were fortunate enough to work with on our initial branding shortly after raising our seed round in 2020. We chose to work with them for many reasons, but one of them was due to their work with Mozilla, a brand that we hold close in our hearts as pioneers for a more open future driven by technology.

Our logo is fairly unique, and has been popular from the first days we started using it; it's unlike a normal bank logo in that it uses warm colours and gradients and has a modern, "app-like" feel.

What was "wrong" with the old logo?

Over the years, a few issues started to come up repeatedly with the original logo. These weren't major barriers in our day-to-day usage, but were frustrating when they did arise.

Some examples:

1. The logo's gradients weren't conductive to printing on physical material (including merchandise and general print media), which came up every year as we worked on materials for major conferences and events.
2. The "feathers" of the Griffin were hard to see at small sizes.
3. Our logo was heavy, due to the design’s layering and gradient maps. This often affected its usage, particularly in digital settings.
4. We loved the original logo‍—‌but as we matured as a company, fixing the overall composition, and improving the logo’s form felt necessary.
5. Our single colour logo wasn’t easy to identify (particularly at a distance). We needed a form that was versatile for all environments, and visually consistent in both colour and monochrome.

There were also some other issues boiling away in the background of the wider Griffin visual brand, but we were finding that it would be extremely challenging to tackle those without also addressing some of the shortcomings of the current logo. So we decided to work on the logo as our first step.

Working with Jon Hicks

We quickly narrowed down the list of designers we'd be interested in working with, with Jon Hicks being at the top of the list due to his prior work for Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mailchimp‍—‌all of which had the challenge of rendering a "creature" as the logo in a way that would work in a wide variety of contexts.

The man, the myth, the logo forgemeister

Jon is a busy guy, and we weren't sure he had the time (or desire!) to work with us. So the first step was to see if he was willing‍—‌particularly since this would be more of an iterative brief. Fortunately, that was his preference as well.

Jon: I always advise clients to update, rather than redesign, where possible. When there is existing brand equity that works, build on that, rather than start from scratch. Griffin approached me to update their logo, and it was clear that there was a solid idea that just needed some refinement on the execution.

What to keep, what to change

This project felt like solving a Rubik’s cube, with many different contexts to be aware of. We knew this was going to take time, and we were fortunate Jon was really patient with us.

Jon: The start of the process is to identify what works about the current logo, and what needs to change. We knew we should keep its' friendly expression (tricky to achieve with such potentially fearsome beasts!), and the warm, inviting colours. Eschewing the traditional conservative blues was important to Griffin.

Jon suggested early on that we step away from thinking about colour and come back to it once we had solved some of the shape-related issues, so that's where we began.

Jon: The key was to concentrate on a monochrome version of the logo first, and move on to colour once the team at Griffin were happy. In order to do this, I sketched profusely, experimenting with cutouts to show areas of depth, such as separating the two ear tufts.

I considered various approaches, from very small changes to a more radical direction that echoed the shapes of the Cambon typeface. This ‘heraldic’ approach was too rigid however.

The free experimentation stage can feel uncomfortable, but it's a key part of the process.

Eliot: As we worked through these early versions with Jon, we wanted to make sure we were striking the right balance between a more modern style (simplified, refined) while also retaining the expression of a logo that had a soft place in everyone's hearts. We wanted to retain the flavour by remastering it into a stronger form, while ensuring every touchpoint would be an opportunity for our logo to flourish.

Ultimately, we decided to:

• Reduce the number of feather lines and detail to help simplify.
• Change the proportion of the bottom feathers, which were more dominant than the important main features.
• Make the eye transparent. The white eye was lost when the logo was shown on a dark background and it’s an important focal point for the face. It’s what draws you in.

It was in the second iteration, where the whole head was redrawn from scratch, that the right shape appeared. This pose, where the Griffin is ‘looking back’ was the key to making it work, and from thereon, it was a matter of iteration and refinement.

Jon: This included a couple of Iive painting sessions over Google Meet with the team at Griffin. Using my iPad, I could quickly create a live preview of the changes we’d just discussed, allowing us to move quicker through the iterations.

Starting to zero in on the final form here‍—‌guess how strong our opinions about beaks and ears are??

One of the key objectives was to have a version of the logo that would work in an outlined form. This distinctive profile is excellent in a huge number of settings and makes the logo easily identifiable even at a distance.

The logo in outline

Jon: Retaining the expression was tricky, but the key was to show the highlight on the top of the beak, allowing the shape of the ‘mouth’ to be subtly suggested. The eye became slightly more curved, to further convey friendliness. Finally, the colour was re-introduced, using the same colours from the original, but keeping the darker purples for the throat area.

The final result!

What comes next

With the logo complete, we're now moving on to a more radical redefinition of our overall visual identity. This is the culmination of a multi-year project where we've been experimenting with what resonates with our team and customers and consolidating that into a series of common threads for our design language that we can build upon and apply everywhere.

The core of owning a brand strategy is unifying and aligning all of the disparate elements that contribute to the points of engagement that people experience. We're still a young company, but we're not an early-stage startup anymore‍—‌and we need our brand to communicate more maturity while staying true to its fundamentals of inspiration, opportunity, and expression.

We've learned from experience that deadlines are for people who don't care about quality, so no promises on when we can share more‍—‌only that in the grand scheme of "now, next, later" we've got a lot of incredible brand work happening in "now" and "next"...and we're looking forward to sharing more when those are done.