*Done while at COLLINS SF*

Founded in 2001 to help businesses and creators easily send email marketing, Mailchimp is a technology company that has always done things its own way. So they made their logo a chimpanzee named Freddie. They doubled down on their hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. They ran a viral podcast ad that mispronounced their own name. They remained wholly independent.

Today, Mailchimp has grown into one of the world’s largest marketing platforms, offering not only their email service, but also powerful and sophisticated marketing tools for businesses of every size. To mark their new era of growth, Mailchimp invited COLLINS to help evolve their brand to reflect and fuel their continued business transformation.

Through a process of immersion in their internal culture and qualitative research with their design target, we identified precisely why the Mailchimp way of work resonated so deeply with their audience: Mailchimp demonstrated to entrepreneurs that leveling up your business doesn’t mean erasing your peculiarities. In a world of templatized sameness, Mailchimp’s success told a story of growing up and staying weird. This led to a unique design strategy that set the company up for the next decade of growth.

In partnership with the in-house Brand Team, we sought to capture and elevate that ineffable Mailchimp spirit, a potent combination of wry humor, modest celebration, and a dash of absurdity. We developed a new brand system that, in each element — from the new logotype, logomark, color palette, typographic system, and hallmark illustration and photographic styles — works to maintain a precise balance between the sophisticated and the surreal (bucking reductive, over-simplified design trends), to better chart the company’s unique path and expression. The solution seeks to amplify Mailchimp as a beacon for its customers, a message to growing brands to nurture their idiosyncrasies and preserve what makes them different.

The evolution retains all the elements that endeared the brand to its first fervent fans while creating space for Mailchimp to grow and speak with greater authority to a wider audience.

Professional or Personal
Professional

Creative Discipline
Graphic Design

Role in Project
Designer on the project. Responsible for the initial direction that got chosen, but did not stay on the project until completion.

Project Credits
Matt Luckhurst – Creative Director
David Nguyen – Design Director
Caroline Bagley – Lead Designer
Erik Berger Vaage – Designer
Ben Crick – Creative Director
Tom Elia – Writer
Kirsten Harkonen – Senior Producer
Sohee Kim – Associate Designer
Angie Shih – Strategist
Anna Sternoff – Strategy Director
Kris Wong – Motion Director
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Mailchimp Brand Team
RG/A