It is with great pleasure and a certain amount of excitement about your feedback that we are presenting our new brand identity to you today. A new design for Raidboxes with the same core and values as before. If you're reading this article, you've probably already noticed our new logo, the new colors and the new graphic elements. Here we would like to tell you more about what has happened and why.

The idea behind the new corporate identity

Having evolved significantly as a company over the last few years (and admittedly getting a little fed up with our old look), we have now set ourselves the task of developing a new corporate identity with the active support of 360Vier that reflects what Raidboxes has become. To create a new appearance that is different from the previous one. Away from the familiar unconventional logo and the different color gradients typical for us, towards something new and grown-up - without losing our old identity.

Market leader in six years

It all started with a first dashboard prototype in 2014, implemented by two "employees" - Johannes and myself. Followed by a first investment in 2016 with five full-time employees at the time. Today, we are a medium-sized company and the WordPress hosting experts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. With currently 48 full-time employees across Europe. To put the scale into perspective: We have gained over eleven new teammates in 2021 alone.

Our values back then are still exactly the same for the entire Raidboxes team today as they were back then. Naturally, we hope that our customers will always uphold these values. To clarify once again what our values have been since the start of Raidboxes:

• Freedom
• Transparency
• Friendliness
• Sustainability
• Performance orientation
• Unconventionality

What do we mean by "brand"?

First of all, it is important to explain what a brand actually is, what we mean by brand presence and what we want to associate with it.

"Brand" is a term we often use and you probably use it too. But if you think outside the box a little, you quickly realize that we rarely define the word "brand". For us, a brand is a person's gut feeling about a service or a company. For example: What immediate gut feeling do you have on brands like Coca-Cola or Greenpeace? Our first questions were, how do brands generate these feelings in us? For the rebranding, we broke this down into three different areas:

1. what is our internal relationship with the raidboxes® brand?

Our logo, our tone of voice in areas like our magazine and website, or how we look on tote bags, t-shirts, digital banners and more.

2. how do outsiders experience our brand?

When people use our products every day, they live the experience we offer and at the same time convey an impression of who we are.

3. how do people share and talk about the raidboxes® brand?

Brands develop a life of their own when we share stories. Or when we talk about brands with people we know.

Quite frankly, we are far more likely to buy something with a strong brand image and talk about it with family, friends and colleagues. We are less likely to trust brands that are less appealing to us personally or have even developed a negative image.

We all know certain brands that have certain associations. We can think of dozens of examples right off the bat - and in the 21st century, nothing beats trust. Casual marketing slogans that might have worked 50 years ago have not worked for a long time.

Sea Shepherd & joint mission

At Raidboxes, we talk a lot about sustainability, climate protection and the major challenges facing humanity as a whole. It's not about whether you personally are a fan of the environmental protection organization Sea Sheperd 's often unconventional and very radical means of trying to do something about overfishing, oil rigs in the Arctic or illegal whaling. It's about who they are and what they stand for when it comes to our planet.

We could discuss whether it is okay for a charity to place Facebook ads to promote donations. Or whether it's okay to sell targeted merchandise in the charity's own online store. But no one can deny this: Once you've engaged with the organization, its brand presence is hard to forget.

The very clear skull and crossbones with trident, based on the well-known pirate symbol, and the merchandise are unmistakably linked. Almost all active members on the ships can be seen wearing corporate fashion from top to bottom at all times on board. Emotionally and culturally, everyone involved is strongly interwoven with the brand and its shared mission. It makes it clear: you are one of us!

Appearance & associations of Raidboxes

We at Raidboxes want to be a brand that evokes emotions, just like Sea Sheperd's appearance does. We are not an environmental organization and have no relation to radicalism, but we call some of the same and other "Our Values". When it comes to the emotions and awareness of raid boxes, we speak the same (figurative) language. We also want certain principles, emotions and associations to be unmistakably linked to Raidboxes.

Raidboxes was and is a business-to-business (B2B) solution. We also see business-to-consumer (B2C) connections and are happy to welcome them to our customer base. However, our core target group is still agencies, freelancers, WooCommerce online stores or people who earn their living with WordPress - in whatever way.

As a reminder: WordPress is open source software and may not be sold directly. However, the services that arise from the WordPress environment, such as agency services and web design or WordPress support, are a global business worth millions. Many people live and work full-time from these customized services for WordPress. The best example is probably Raidboxes itself. Originated from an agency business called "Gutado" in 2014.

Creating our new appearance

In the beginning there was just a white sheet of paper. A white space that wanted to be filled with content. It was to be done in the spirit of Raidboxes and in line with one of our values. Raidboxes has always been built on trust and recommendation through creativity, freedom and transparency. In our eyes, this applies to our employees just as much as it does to our customers in over 55 countries worldwide.

"For me, Raidboxes stands for the passion of free and wild and creative people."

Torben Simon Meier

Raidboxes becomes raidboxes®

You can say what you like about our well-known brand identity. Some loved it, others weren't a big fan of the unique design (of the old logo) and the constant capital letters. Nevertheless, it was the best thing that could have happened for our brand image, as it ensured that the brand was always unmistakable. Whether at trade fairs and WordCamps or webinars and on advertising material. The Raidboxes logo and name are highly memorable. Unfortunately, the word mark could not be used flexibly.

What is changing now?

 1. our logo

Of course, we will remain true to our name: you will continue to create boxes that include a WordPress installation and all the familiar tools. However, the logo and the word mark itself will undergo a change.

With the new logo, we are simply becoming more grown-up, but retaining the liberal, creative and friendly aspects. In our eyes, this has also been achieved with the newly created pictogram. The box with the smile in combination with the word mark stands for everything that is important to us at Raidboxes:

A pictogram at last

Our new pictogram, which normally forms our new logo together with "raidboxes", is one of the most obvious changes to our old brand identity.

Until now, we only ever had the option of displaying our company name as a wordmark, as we didn't have a "real" logo. Quite nice, but if you have little space or want to play with the logo in terms of design, it was practically impossible. The horizontal, slightly slanted placement was fixed at all times.

With the new and first pictogram from Raidboxes, we are giving ourselves the opportunity to strengthen and use the brand - without always having to use the entire word mark. The possibilities that arise from this are almost endless.

2. well-known typography

Our font is and remains the same: FF Mark (from FontFont in Berlin). We chose it when we launched Raidboxes in 2016 because it is legible, clear and accessible, but also, according to the creators of the typeface, "by creatives for creatives". What would suit our brand better than a font like this?

The big difference to the previous appearance is that we will now use FF Mark Pro for continuous text instead of Roboto from Google. It has a creative touch. And we thought it was exactly the right font to describe our software and the team behind it.

3. new color palette

Our colors are no longer based solely on the familiar blending of different gradients in shades of blue. We made a conscious decision to move away from gradients and instead work with clear color accents that underline the transformation of Raidboxes from a startup to a "grown-up company".

Between you and me: all that blue in the old design has the typical hosting character. If you take a closer look at the competitors in the hosting sector, it quickly becomes clear that blue is the color of choice. Understandable, because blue radiates trust and seriousness.

These values are also important to us, but are emphasized by other measures. The new word mark with the adapted lettering and our dark blue accents on the new website itself serve as an example.

The other chosen tones are primarily intended to emphasize what is most important to us apart from free space: your creativity! The colors should make it clear that we are mainly there for the creative area and feel most comfortable there.

There is also a lot of white space. Because - as already mentioned at the beginning - the start of a creative process is usually a blank sheet of paper. We want to emphasize this with the help of white space.

4. new graphic elements

Our graphic elements move in a way that shows the range of human creativity: sometimes calm, rounded and gentle, sometimes jagged and full of energy and passion.

In combination with the new colors and lots of white space, you immediately get the feeling that this is an artistic project. That's exactly what we want: To give you more space so that you can concentrate on your creativity.

With ups and downs to the new brand image

We wanted our users to be involved in the development of the website. That's why we asked our agency partners in fall 2021 what they thought of us and what they associated with the previous website.

The interim results of the first wordmark and the new pictogram were also used in these surveys. Overall, we received a positive and approving response from our partners for the colors and the wordmark. This confirmed that we were on the right track with regard to the presentation of the design elements in combination with the newly selected colors.

It still hurts to have to say that: When we think back to the reactions to the initial results of the interim elaborations, we did not come off well. The feedback was that the newly chosen pictogram was little to not at all self-explanatory. Despite the simplicity of the entire word mark, the design was not convincing. So we spent another few months working on the pictogram. We had to find a way to emphasize the simplicity of the logo.

"A logo is good if you can scratch it into the sand with your big toe."

Kurt Weidemann, typographer, designer

The pictogram had to meet both our internal and external expectations and at the same time emphasize what we do: Software-as-a-Service for the creative industry. We also involved external freelancers in the pictogram, without a satisfactory result. In the end, we created the final version of the "satisfied box" in-house, which we as an entire team and company are behind.

We hope you like what we wanted to express with the logo, why we changed it and how we got there. Without you, our self-reflection would not have been possible!

We would like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to our partners and the agencies and freelancers involved. A big thank you also goes to our partner agency 360Vier, with whom we worked together to create the new brand identity and the new website. The graphic elements, the visual impact and the structure of the new corporate identity were developed together over a period of months. The collaboration was driven by constant feedback and creative discovery processes - and not always very easy (with us 😅).

Living the newly developed every day

To experience our new brand identity - and to make people feel comfortable with Raidboxes - we know that we must continue to provide the best software for our users. We know that we remain committed to doing even more for climate protection. And that we must always remain true to our vision of limitless global opportunities for all, the values mentioned above and the freedom that guides us.

Raidboxes is ready for the future

In our eyes, we have created a new brand identity that underlines everything that was and is important to Raidboxes - with the only difference being that we have grown up over the past six years. The new look deliberately emphasizes this growth.

Our most important values such as freedom, unconventionality and friendliness are retained. With the help of the graphic elements and the many white spaces on the new website and the logo, a large creative stage has been created. Old elements such as the typeface are retained in order to indirectly promote a certain degree of recognition.

We hope you find this development just as exciting and euphoric as we do, because the most important thing for us is still the same: Be free and wild and creative!