Yep: Burnt orange is the new black.
We wanted to take a brief moment to introduce you to something we’ve been working on in the background for the past few months.
While we’ve had a big year of growth — with great new Slingers joining the team, and a host of wonderful new clients — we started to feel we’d outgrown our brand. Our website was hobbled together (in true startup fashion), and our logo lacked the polish and attention to detail we pride ourselves on.
So we set out to fix it.
We spoke to a lot of designers and agencies, and one stood out as the obvious choice: Universal Favourite. They didn’t start by asking us what we wanted in a website, or a logo, or identity. The first thing they did was get to know us, and our business. They were immediately genuine, creative, passionate, and thorough. We knew we’d found the perfect partner.
We love our new brand and website, but we think Meghan Armstrong, our designer at Universal Favourite, says it best:
“We felt the main priority was to design a site that felt as energetic and dynamic as Sling & Stone itself. We wanted to harness all of what we were hearing and seeing from the team — agility, passion, a keen ear and eye for innovators, collaboration — and create not only a design system but a uniquely fun, interactive site compared with other agencies in the space.”
As you can see right now, this new website (still at slingstone.test) works beautifully on any sized screen. It was built for our needs from the ground up to help us better share our work with the world, and most importantly, give you a sneak peek into what is happening at the agency.
We want future Slingers, and clients we partner with, to be able to get a feel for our personality and approach.
We love what Universal Favourite has created. But they didn’t just give us a quick update and stop there— they looked at the brand more broadly, including the colours, logos, and an entire style guide. Meghan again:
“The site redesign opened up a few opportunities to introduce a bold colour palette, uniquely illustrated icon system, and fresh typography with a strong voice. Sling & Stone had existing brand loyalty to the colour orange, but we decided to go all out with a strong, brighter hue that felt instantly ownable and commanding, but fresh.
“We also wanted to maintain the metaphor behind the name and previous logo, and reflect this meaning through iconography that was designed to feel like it had this sense of movement and energy to it.”
All this work has flown through to new business cards, photographic styling, and a whole lot more.
We have a new style guide and typeface that we love (we’re sticklers for the detail), a palette of colours (which you’ll see more of in the future), sets of icons (used throughout the site and in physical forms), and our unofficial in-joke/mascot Señor Crab has even become an animated GIF.
While these might seem like small details, it’s the glue that binds what we do together — it represents who we are and allows us to work seamlessly, and efficiently as a team.
To celebrate our rebrand, we’ve even turned Señor Crab into a real neon sign above our bar, the Crabshack:
