In late 2020 the Memberful team set out on a journey to refresh our brand. Having released powerful new features including paid podcasts, custom landing pages, support for 12 languages, and choose what you pay (just to name a few), we saw it as a great opportunity to realign our core brand values, identity, and website design with all that Memberful offers.

This blog post is a summary of all that took place during the re-brand. We took this project on as a small team with some external help for illustrations. It was a very rewarding project to collaborate on. We think this update will help those considering Memberful better understand who we are and what we offer.

Branding

In order to refresh our brand, we needed to establish a few constraints that outlined who we are and why we do what we do internally. These include:

1. Our Promise
2. Brand Pillars
3. Our Brand Personality
4. Visual Expression

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Our promise

Our brand promise states what Memberful stands for and is supported by our brand pillars.

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Brand pillars

Brand pillars are those aspects of our organization that differentiate us. Everything we do revolves around ensuring these pillars remain long-standing.

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Brand personality

These traits and guardrails provide a framework for the creative potential and flexibility of Memberful's brand personality. Across all of our materials, this personality is used to shape our communication style and define our brand and experience.

We arrived at three key traits:

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Visual expression

Illustrations are an important part of bringing our brand to life. To distinguish ourselves we tried to be unique in delivery. It's not every day the illustrations you see on a website or marketing materials are crafted entirely from paper.

We sought the expertise of paper artist/ photographer Maren Schabhüser to help define the Memberful visual expression. She creates 3D folded paper scenes by hand and photographs them as expressive scenes that depict a message or story. It comes across as playful, but the level of craft involved makes it professional.

Maren took our color scheme and created a series of compositions based on all of Memberful's offerings. The results are outstanding.

New typography

For several years up until this launch, we remained fairly loyal to the Proxima Nova typeface collection. Memberful still uses Proxima Nova in-app but we chose to go with something more loud and bold for the brand refresh. Eventually, our goal is to align typography wholistically between the application and all marketing materials. We're not far off.

In our hunt for a bolder typeface, we came across the infamous Klim Type Foundary who make some of the best fonts we've laid eyes on.

We had initial requirements of our chosen typeface being set in a sans-serif format. Serif or monospace typefaces just didn't match up with the new branding so those were immediately out of the running. After setting up some example specimens we unanimously chose Söhne as our new typeface. Söhne comes in 16 styles with only three that we make use of.

A fun fact: Söhne's classification is all set in German so I had to learn a touch of German in the process of designing our updated marketing materials, logo, and website.

Heavier font-weights (700, 500, 400) were used for headings and taglines while system fonts were used for long-form copy and content.

Logo refresh

On top of realigning our brand, we sought to update our logo slightly with refreshed typography now that we had Söhne in our arsenal. The red Memberful "M" logomark remains the same as previous iterations.

Refined color palette

Our color palette was previously quite simple. We continued that trend with the re-brand but introduced louder accent colors to complement the core Memberful red. You'll find the blue and gray colors mixed in as accents throughout to help balance graphical compositions.

Website redesign

If you're reading this blog post around the time it was published, chances are you might be looking at a redesigned website. We did a complete refresh of the website which now features dedicated landing pages (more to come) of what Memberful offers.

The goal with the redesign was to both voice our new brand as well as communicate what Memberful can do for those looking to see success with their membership-based businesses.

Our approach was to be unique with visuals so we partnered with Maren mentioned before to create some stunning paper illustrations to help encapsulate what Memberful is and how our customers can make use of the platform successfully.

Home page

Our home page sets the stage for those looking for best-in-class membership software.

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How it works

A landing page for our landing pages that explains Memberful in a nutshell. From this page, you can learn what Memberful is capable of and click elsewhere to explore even further.

Break out landing pages

Podcasts

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WordPress Membership Plugin

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Newsletters

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Communities

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Integrations

Takeaways

It has only been a handful of days since we launched the rebrand and website design. So far there has been a warm response to the update. A brand is never truly stagnant. From here our journey has just begun. There is so much in store for the future that we can't wait to share with you soon!