Soak is one year old, and what a year it’s been! We’ve grown from a core team of six to eleven full-time employees, plus a network of freelancers that we work with. Our client base has also grown dramatically and it was decided that it was time to refresh the Soak brand and website, in order to reflect how far we’ve come in such a short time.


The original design had served us faithfully, but we felt it no longer represented us the modern, digital agency we’ve become.

Re-branding yourself is often acknowledged as one of the hardest tasks designer’s can undertake and so it proved with us. The biggest challenge was bringing a clean modern style to the brand, without losing the fluid, organic quality that had inspired the original design.

Early on the decision was made to use a smooth vector output for the logo rather than the hand-drawn quality we had used before. However all designing begins off screen, as shown by these initial (very rough) sketches.

The scamps soon became three iterations, each with their own good and bad points, but at this stage there was a clear favourite. This version, based on the font Tartine, had a nice smooth, organic feel to it, whilst offering a sort of retro charm that is very in vogue at the moment.

It still lacked a real sense of identity though and so we set about reshaping the letter-forms. We extended the ‘k’ to form a wave shape and drawing inspiration from the original Soak splat we introduced two dots above. A tricky re-working of the ‘a’ and we were almost there.

Of course the logo is just the central pivot of the brand, but from developing it we were able to identify the values we wanted to express the rest of the site; clean and modern, but with a slight quirkiness, aspirations we think we’ve just about managed to capture.

Tags: logo, rebrand, soak