Written by: Elaine Lee

Let’s start with the ChickAdvisor brand.

ChickAdvisor’s brand is fun, feminine, flirty, and flowery – and very, very pink! When I started working for ChickAdvisor in June of 2016, my graphic design portfolio fit in perfectly with all of these things. I loved illustrating flowers, I loved pink, and I loved that ChickAdvisor’s brand and personality connected with so many people that were part of this community.

As the years went by, I had so many fun opportunities to play with ChickAdvisor’s brand. From redesigning the beloved Chick, rebranding the website, designing luxurious business cards (soft touch laminate on the front, gold foil names and accents on the back – design nerds will understand what I mean), creating a flowery banners for ChickAdvisor’s in-person events, designing the pattern inside the Product Review Club mailer boxes, gold Chick mugs, creating many, many different iterations of product info cards, makeup-themed patterns for social media, and many, many floral patterns to be used on assets like product cards, box stickers, and as the background of social images.

ChickAdvisor had a very clear identity that we wanted everyone to notice. We wanted our advocates to know from the moment they saw the Chick on our white mailer box, that they had received an item to review from our signature program: the Product Review Club. We wanted the social images people shared to shout “This is from ChickAdvisor!” with the hot pink patterned interior of the boxes on display (this was back in 2016-2018 when unboxing photos were trendy on social media). Our goal was to attract more advocates to our review site with our signature look and feel, as this would help us build our database of advocates and establish us as a trusted brand. We did this successfully with a database of 262,388 members to date.

Then along came Butterly. No longer a product review site, but a platform that brands use to build their own communities, conduct market research, and launch new products. Do what ChickAdvisor does but on their own site, using their database. Our brand identity needed to take a backseat, be a little bit quieter - but still hold its own.

How did we transition from ChickAdvisors vibrant, pink branding to Butterly, a more white-label experience for brands?

With the creation of the Butterly platform in 2020, we wanted to give our clients a more white-labelled experience but still have a personality to make building campaigns and using our dashboards a nice experience.

To start with that, we needed a logo.

Butterly’s logo started off with exploring many different typefaces, but it was quickly decided that it should be a custom illustrated by me with fun, but bold script lettering. It took a fair few tries with ink and a brush pen, but after I had a rough base to work with, I traced over the best iteration using tracing paper with pencil. From there, it was a matter of vectorizing the letterforms in Adobe Illustrator, evening out the kerning, adjusting the ascenders and descenders and experimenting with different versions of the underline.

I also made sure to tie in the butter theme. Butter is yellow and Ali, the cofounder, loves bright yellow. The dot in the logo is meant to represent a pat of butter. The script lettering is flowy and smooth like butter, which is what we wanted our customer experience to be.

With the logo decided on, it was easier going forward. I designed an outer box wrapper for portable speakers we were using as promotional gifts for clients and interns. Since the size of the box was virtually the same as a brick of butter, the design was cheekily made to look like one. “Brand Awareness Spread”, anyone?

From there, I chose fun pastel colours to paint our interface, product info cards, and fun infographics scattered through our community/consumer-facing pages. Though our assets are colourful, pastel colours support our brand but don't overshadow our brands we represent. It was easy to switch out and limit our colour palette depending on what was needed. The colours provide a base for our signature look, but let our client’s assets be the main star of the show.

And that is where we are with our branding journey so far. From the extremely feminine and pink ChickAdvisor brand to Butterly - still colourful and cheeky - a brand that holds its own but still leaves space for the clients’ brand. As a relatively new brand, we are constantly evolving our brand and technology, and I can’t wait to see where the next few years take us!