UX research

New Company Mission & Positioning

The company's established mission statement and brand positioning remained untouched from when the co-founders and I first penned them in January 2016. The company's DNA had changed significantly after their pivot to enterprise solutions. We needed to revisit the company mission and brand positioning so we could create an identity that was aligned with the team's values and the company's business goals.

After a roundtable meeting with the entire team, I processed their input into several mission and positioning statements for review. After a few iterations, we arrived at something that felt truly representative of the company and its goals:

Mission Statement

At Reach Labs, our mission is to create wireless technology that is the foundation for a new standard of power delivery and distribution.

Positioning Statement (framework via First Round)

For hardware companies who strive to enable people to do more and live better lives, Reach Labs is an enterprise technology company that creates long-range wireless power solutions for hardware devices and systems. Unlike other wireless power companies, Reach Labs offers real technology solutions that produce tangible results.

Core Positionings

‍Honest We value trust through transparency and humility—we let our work speak for itself.

‍Responsible A strong sense of responsibility motivates the speed, rigor, and depth of understanding with which we work. Safety above all else.

‍Impressive Exciting and credible advancements in wireless power with real and useful applications.

‍Real Wireless power is real and you can benefit from it right now. We’re committed to making advanced science and technology as useful and accessible as possible.

‍Empowering Our research and development is centered around enabling people to do more and live better lives.

UX research

Old Logo — "Sunflower"

The old logo (which I had designed back in Mid 2016), with its floating circle above a rounded base, was internally named the Sunflower mark. It was designed to evoke feelings of freedom and wirelessness.

It's quite heavy, it doesn't work well against dark backgrounds, and scaling it up and down is also problematic. I was originally brought in to make refinements to this design. So I did!

The old logo with the Sunflower mark.

I broke down the geometric elements of the logo and made perturbations around them in an almost evolutionary algorithm approach. The frontrunners were presented in the appendix item below (with silly names for fun). "Is less truly more?" ended up being the favorite.

The old logo with the Sunflower mark.

I presented my refinements in a document, explaining the underlying grid and illustrating the improvements over the old logo.

The new logo and its revisions explained.

UX research

Secret Project — "Wavemark"

The team was happy with the revisions I had made, but deep down I knew that because the Sunflower logo was made when the company was consumer-facing, not even the strongest of revisions could really be successful. Designing a new logo was out of scope, so I did it in secret and left it as a "one more thing" (a la Steve Jobs) for my final presentation.

I named the new logo the Wavemark, and I was terribly proud of it. The team could tell, and they loved it as well! They decided to move forward with it. Hooray!

Check out the final designs below.

The new logo for Reach Labs

A type exploration to give confidence in the choice of Sharp Grotesk for the primary typeface.

Typography breakdown geared toward web.

The new brand palette for Reach Labs.

Original image by Character for Essential

Example print/physical applications to better illustrate the brand possibilities.

Example landing page and documentation hub using the brand and visual identity. Unfortunately this example was not consulted for the design of Reach Labs' current website, as you might come to realize.