IIF. BRAND STRATEGY, STORY, LOGO, VISUAL IDENTITY + WEBSITE.
They get the most complex infrastructure projects built. We do the same with brands.
Maybe your daily commute takes you on Highway 6 or the Jerusalem Light Rail line. Maybe you’re reading this on a device powered by electricity from the Dalia generating plant. Or maybe the water you use for your garden comes from a Veridis desalinization facility or you shower with water heated by Tamar natural gas. The IIF built all of them. Building, operating, and maintaining the kind of complex projects that modern life depends on is what they do. And they are extremely good at it.
The problem was that their brand didn’t live up to the incredibly high standard they set for the rest of the company. It was okay, but this is the kind of organization that’s deeply offended by being okay. They strive to be nothing less than the best. To call them perfectionists sells them short. Could we help them bring their brand up to that level? Challenge accepted.
Whether you’re building a structure or a brand, a solid foundation is essential. For a brand, that means the brand strategy. We interviewed key stakeholders, their partners in government, their competitors – anyone who would help us arrive at the truth of this company. One thing kept coming up: The IIF funds their projects through investors – providing a good return on those investments is akin to a sacred duty to them. From site selection to operation to maintenance – at its core, this is what the IIF is all about. So we wove that insight into a manifesto that built to the tag line: The Art of Appreciating Assets.
We didn’t want to depart completely from the logo they had been using for years, but we did want to make it more contemporary and bold. Containing it in a circle made it stronger and also provided a better lockup with their name. We selected a typeface that’s classic yet modern. Like the IIF itself, it’s understated – this is a modest company that prefers to let its assets speak for themselves. For that reason, we designed a visual identity that uses a lot of black and a lot of white to display their impressive assets to their best advantage.
To create the optimal structure for IIF’s website, we concentrated on the UX and information architecture before turning our attention to page design and copy. The end result was a clean, easy-to-navigate site that gives IIF’s portfolio of incredible projects center stage. It was done in WordPress with a responsive design for mobile. We also created a jaw-dropping video for the home page to capture people’s attention from the moment they arrive at the site.
The copy we wrote for the IIF brand across the board established a voice for the brand that captures just what they’re like as a company. Smart. Economical. Trustworthy. Unembellished, but never boring. It’s a voice you probably would listen to because you know what it’s saying is important and worth your attention.
Modest as they as, the IIF team is an accomplished group with impressive credentials. We wanted to capture that spirit with photography that shows the small team that has built so much. Authenticity, honesty and professionalism. (Something we can certainly relate to here at natie.)
This was exactly the kind of branding project we strive for. It gave us a chance to partner with kind, inspiring and incredible people at the very top of their field. Delivering a brand with excellence as its core attribute is the kind of project we live for and it was humbling to be chosen out of so many branding agencies to do it.
