Case Study 02 · Ticket Attendant
A brand system, built to scale down.
My first project at Ticket Attendant. Made a new logo, created a brand book, implemented new branding across all platforms.
Role
Designer, with the senior designer
Scope
Logo, brand book, style guide, website
Tools
Adobe Illustrator, WordPress
Year
2024
New Logo
Simplified and elevated.
Ticket Attendant's brand colors are purple, black and white. You can use the slider below to compare the old logo and the new logo. The old logo had at least 10 different colors. It was hard to scale down because the details became hard to make out
Drag the handle — or focus it and use the ← → keys
Before. A flight attendant inside a circular frame in front of two tickets, using at least ten different colours. Hard to scale down because the detail turned blurred at small sizes, and the illustration styles inside were not harmonious with one another.
After. A ticket shape to the left of the ta initials. We have reduced the colors down to 2, drawn as vector so it scales cleanly to any size. The ticket alone works as a favicon and an app icon, and the imagery and letterforms share one geometric language.
A cohesive brand is more than just a logo or a colour palette. It is a reflection of the company's values, mission, and identity.
Beyond the Logo
A background texture from the logo.
A logo on its own doesn't make a company look like a brand. I built a repeating background pattern from the TA letterforms that we used for business cards, newsletters, brochures, the website — so the brand had a texture people would recognise before they read a word of it.
Brand Book
TA Brand Book.
The logo was just the beginning. Here's the full and complete brand book I made.
The colors needed to be codified and accounted for light and dark scenarios.
It couldn't be too low contrast making sure we adhere to WACG accessibilty standards, and so anyone and everyone can see it.
Here's a bunch of ways NOT to use the logo.
The logo fits into a grid such that the ticket ant "t" are the same height and it's a standard size.
We needed to make sure that nothing gets too close to the logo so it's not cut off.
The TA color Palette includes multiple shades of purple so that when we're designing text, images, backgrounds, and icon we can use a variety of standardized colors. Often times text was the "Darkest Purple" when the background was light. In dark mode the "Lightest Purple" was text with the darkest beig the background.
Speaking of text, our brand font was Satoshi.
We chose to use images of our software in computer and mobile shots rather than stock images. TA sells software afterall.
The brand extends off the screen: business cards, merch, and all other items are included in the brand book.
The company merchandise uses one of the simplified one-tone logos due to printing constraints.
The mobile app icon is an example of how well the new logo scales.
In addition to images, fonts, and colors, a brand is also the company's voice, tone, and message.
We talked with the company founders to determine the company values.
Brand voice is how the company talks about itself, how the message is hopefully received, and the feelings the company wants to convey.
All of this is standardized too so that the company conveys a cohesive, harmonious message.
That way it all seems like it's coming from one company. Ticket Attendant is a small company that began as a start up but has been around and succesful for 15 years. It's important to sound like it.
Lastly email signatures for all employees so that all communication internally and externally comes from that cohesive place.
The Website
With the brand updated, the site was next.
The voice, the content and the overall feel all needed to match. The old site was inefficient and outdated; the new one is simpler, more direct, and clear about what a visitor should do.
Outcome
Updated and uniform.
The organization took to the unified approach quickly. The clearest proof came at the annual trade show: promotional materials, signage and merchandise all got dramatically easier to produce, because nobody had to re-decide what the company looked like every time they opened a file. And as a bonus, the clients and new prospects loved thenew look.
Reflection
What I learned
This was an exciting project. I came in expecting a logo design and left with a much better understanding of what a brand system is for. Making a whole brand system is a decision made once that makes the next hundred decisions clear.
The scaling constraint taught me the most. A mark that only works large is a mark that doesn't work. The favicon and later the app icon showed that designing from the smallest use upward produced a better result than designing beautifully and shrinking it afterwards. That is the same lesson mobile-first taught me on Concourse, arriving from a completely different direction.
It also gave me the foundation for everything that followed. By the time we started designing the product, there was no argument left about what Ticket Attendant looked or sounded like. We had a unified brand voice, tone and look that elevated this startup to look like the institution they are.
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