ISO Brand Identity

The design process for ISO’s new brand identity involved several key steps. Motherbird conducted a brand audit with a focus group to assess ISO’s current brand and identify areas for improvement, laying the strategic foundations for the new identity.

The audit revealed existing equity in certain brand elements, especially the brandmark. This was updated to align with the new brand direction and provide a stronger digital focus. However, it was apparent that ISO had a highly disorganised brand identity, featuring different approaches throughout the brand. To address this, Motherbird developed a ’Micro Meso Macro’ grid system, inspired by Earth’s longitude and latitude lines. This system enabled scalable brand communication, ensuring flexibility and consistency across platforms, regions, and audiences.

There was further brand development and exploration via a curated library of images and a customisable illustration asset kit that showcases ISO’s global influence and diverse impact. This includes custom-branded and fully accessible secondary icon sets to support the brand. A brand typeface that ticked all the accessibility boxes was carefully selected and a robust brand guideline created. From here the team at Motherbird commenced rollout of all ISO collateral, including a well-considered suite of motion assets ensuring the internal marketing and communications team were equipped with a set of templates and assets that would be useful for years to come.

Ultimately, the design process undertaken culminated in a powerful system to manage ISO’s vast amount of collateral, ensuring the brand remains organised and consistent. These steps collectively ensured that the new brand identity is structured, precise, inclusive, and adaptable, aligning with ISO’s global reach and purpose and providing the marketing and communications team with a strong and cohesive brand to work with.

The ISO brand gets nerdy with the fundamental design principles and reference to the International Design Style by ensuring that no element is superfluous.

The grid system allows ISO to scale their brand communication based on specific needs, ensuring versatility and consistent application across platforms, regions, and audiences.

The open-source typeface Inter, designed for screen use and supporting 147 languages, ensures the brand is accessible globally; inclusivity is essential to the brand’s identity. To support the typography, a curated library of images and customisable illustrations mean that content is easily reproduced for any desired target market, putting less strain on internal resources while providing a cohesive and consistent brand identity.

The design process emphasised creating a structured and organised brand system. This ensures all brand communications are clear, precise, and of high quality, reducing miscommunication and enhancing reliability. As the brand system is highly flexible to different applications, this reduces the need for large updates, therefore minimising resource consumption and ensuring ISO can stay on brand, all the time.

With its reference to Swiss design and the International Design Style the project sets a strong precedent for design excellence. The innovative grid system, inclusive design elements, and comprehensive approach demonstrate the benefits of investing in professional design. The project showcases how a well-designed brand system can enhance an organisation’s global influence and impact, setting a standard for others to follow.

The most difficult thing about developing a brand of ISO’s scale is to ensure it has enough rules to build strong consistency but to be flexible enough to be expressive and unique. It is a true balancing act. To enable this, the grid system that was built is flexible and adaptable enough to be highly usable, but robust enough to be highly recognisable.

This system features a scalable ’Micro Meso Macro’ grid that allows for flexible communication across different scales, from local to global. The more zoomed-in the grid is (Micro), the more specific the topic, such as a single ISO standard. Conversely, the more zoomed-out the grid is, the more general the communication piece, like a strategy document, annual report, or conference. This flexibility ensures consistent and recognisable branding across various platforms, regions, and audiences.

A risk with developing a “standards” brand is that you can become too standard and off-the-shelf. Using the brand typeface Inter, Motherbird explored how it can be applied in more dynamic and expressive ways to inject life, personality, and a human element throughout the brand.

The rebrand has given the ISO Marketing and Communications team a huge amount of confidence when using their brand, enhancing the speed of application internally and the consistency externally. The result takes their brand to a new level globally and is a reflection of the important work they do.

The immediate impact of the new brand identity on ISO’s internal team has been resounding. Huge efficiencies have already been created in brand and communications rollout. Less decisions need to be made on how each brand application should be executed and the team can go to market confident and proud.

Because ISO works in improving the entire world through standardisation, the more effective their communications are; the more the world adopts standards, and as a result we potentially all live safer, healthier and happier lives.

While the rebrand process itself doesn’t directly encompass circular design, it is one of ISO’s core focuses for their standards to adhere to.

Having a Melbourne design agency rebranding a global organisation that improves the world, places Victoria’s design and creative culture at the forefront of innovation globally.