Instinet
Brett led this project during his 17-year tenure as Thinkso’s founder and executive creative director.
Instinet has set the pace for innovation in the electronic trading industry for nearly five decades. To mark this milestone, the CMO tasked us with developing an end-to-end brand overhaul that included a new visual identity, solutions architecture, messaging, and brand voice. The redesign underscores the company’s continued relevance in an era of exceptional change and opportunity.
The new look immediately conveys a sense of dynamism and purpose, while the retooled brand architecture and strategic messaging underscore both Instinet’s culture of innovation and its everyday practical value in an increasingly complex business.
Instinet’s new brand identity was introduced internally through “Vision in Action,” a short but powerful handbook that describes the spirit of Instinet and what the brand stands for. As part of this book, we commissioned a custom, reportage-style photo shoot to capture the buzz of the trading floor and Instinet’s unique people.
The refreshed logo changes the treatment of the name from the original all-caps acronym (Institutional Networks) to that of a proper noun—uncovering a new sense of friendliness and personality that had always been there, but had been obscured.
The typography dovetails seamlessly with the hard right angles of the revamped chevron motif, which is then utilized as a central element throughout the brand architecture.
Chevron shapes combine with an energetic color palette to create a series of service labels. They are used to identify and group communications within the overall brand architecture. Interestingly, although only comprised of two elements, the icons create visuals that conceptually tie in to the subject matter: right-pointing arrows for Workflow Solutions, upward trending indicators for Trading Services, a mountain range for Market Insights, and water ripples for Liquidity Venues.
A fresh website design reflects the brand’s new energy and showcases a more provocative and engaging editorial voice. Visitors are invited to explore Instinet’s story and services from a menu of a set of discrete “homepages” for its core capabilities, each with a distinctive take on the brand’s visual vocabulary.
A series of simple brand advertisements were used to introduce the industry to Instinet’s new brand identity, including this example that appeared in Times Square during the firm’s NY Liquidity Party in 2018
The firm brochure, “Agents of Change,” underscores Instinet’s role as a leader and innovator within financial technology. A facsimile of the patent for the Instinet Communications System—the first electronic trading platform—is juxtaposed with the high-tech, fast-paced trading floor of today and the quirky personalities who thrive there.
Since most of Instinet’s products exist as electronic interfaces, they became the inspiration for the artful and abstract cover treatments. On the interior, however, we put a premium on clearly describing and accurately depicting its offering. The Newport® brochure, for example, uses the bright orange of Workflow Solutions to call out its unique features over an expansive gatefold image of a trading terminal.
At the single solution level, we created a set of highly-visual sales sheets that extend the brand vocabulary with clean-lined pictograms and charts. Design is straightforward and practical, packing layers of information into easily scannable layouts. Editorial is audience-focused, driven by large headlines and brief and clearly delineated copy.
Thought leadership publications leverage the chart and illustration style of the one-pagers, simplifying the palette to emphasize the primary brand colors with ample white space. Layouts deliver high-word-count copy cleanly and clearly.
In collaboration with our clients in Instinet’s marketing department, we created bold and eye-catching concepts for trade shows and other corporate and industry events that helped them truly stand out from the crowd. Colorful, clever, and fun, they help express Instinet’s forward-looking brand identity.
