Rebranding a company at the best of times is a costly endeavor. While I was the Chief Design Officer at Quirky, I had to keep all of the day-to-day design tasks running (the business needed to keep producing and selling products) while we simultaneously rebranded Quirky. I split the team in two, with one half moving off-premises to the old NYT headquarters in Times Square. This allowed the designers to mentally shift from our current offices and realize they were creating something brand new. The change of location made this feel like a really special project.

Our final design solution had a simple principle: the one great equalizer in the creative field, the one all-embracing skill, is the ability to draw a stick figure. You draw a stick figure, your mini-self portrait, that will become your Quirky icon. It will symbolize you online and may one day be branded on the genius product you invented. We used these stick figures in all aspects of our brand, and the tagline ‘products invented by real people like you’ was our rallying cry.

This video shows some of the processes and fun we had along this journey.