Since launching our new branding and website last year and introducing tweaks to celebrate our 25th anniversary, I have received many wonderful compliments and feedback in meetings and travels this year. I thought I’d share our process since many people have asked for our visual transformation’s “behind the scenes” story.
We initially started with conversations to update our website, and in doing so, we ended up re-considering our entire corporate identity. This was not the original plan when we started, but it was hard to contain our excitement once we got rolling. A brand’s visual identity is more than just a logo, website, or sales presentation deck; it should reflect the company’s values, vision, and journey. In its 25-year history, ROI Solutions has had only a few versions of its website, and I created the first two. If you have time, take a peek at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, Version One | Version Two | Current Version.
Around our tenth year, we hired someone rather than creating it ourselves.
The Beginning of the Journey
Our evolution is no knock against the earlier companies or individuals who worked on the former versions. Indeed, those gave us the stepping stones to reflect where we were headed as a company. It took an outside expert we trusted to help us understand the importance of maintaining a brand image that resonates with our clients and reflects our evolution as a company. The credit for that understanding belongs to Bill Bowman of Bowman Design + Direction.
I first learned of Bill by admiring his photography online. I was at once struck by his design sense. We invited him to take initial photos of the ROI Team and our office during COVID-19, so the office was sparsely populated, but Bill made the best of it and had some fantastic perspectives. This first step gave us an early sense of new design directions and the courage to explore them. Little did we know how far he would take us in a brief time. The best way I can describe Bill is that he’s like the Wizard of Oz meets the Magic Man. He sees possibilities we didn’t because we are so close to our work.
In earlier processes, no one ever dared to alter our logo or branding and instead worked around it. To some degree, a company’s logo is sacrosanct. Since I designed our original logo and am the owner and CEO, I suspect it wasn’t for lack of desire. As a result, it was a logo that remained with the company for its first twenty-five years.
A logo is often the first impression the brand makes regardless of company size. Still, there wasn’t a symbiotic relationship between our logo and “our brand” that I initially designed 25 years ago. I.M. Pei said, “Architecture is the very mirror of life. You only need cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society.” I think that’s true for a company’s branding. Looking back at our old logo and materials, I can feel our roots and direction. Still, I think in terms of building and structure, Frank Gehry famously said, “Architecture should speak of its time and place but yearn for timelessness,” which I think Bill has created for us.
The Design Process
We first asked Bill to redesign a whitepaper and email template system. Bill stayed within the existing logo design and color palette but made subtle changes. He creatively illustrated shape variations of the existing logo and leveraged the shapes as image masks that encapsulated photographs of personas, causes, and organizations we serve. The result is a polished and well-crafted template system that many team members utilize.
Afterward, a plan was mentioned to Bill that we were evolving Revolution CRM and MiLo Intelligence and were continuing to innovate by creating two new products, Unite Analytics and Ignite Marketing. Bill recommended a suite of brand logos within the same identity, including a parent company logo with supportive product identities, to better convey who we are and where we are going while cohesively working within the same visual dialogue.
Next, we moved forward with the rebranding project, and Bill started with collaborative discovery sessions that incorporated a journey of introspection and creativity. He led us through business strategy mapping, where we revisited our core values and commitment to the social impact sector, reviewed our products and services, and the heart of the messaging we wanted to convey to our clients and partners. The interviews, group collaboration, and behind-the-scenes work produced brand descriptors and differentiators, brand architecture, persona detail, product value proposition and goals, competitive analysis, and a Venn diagram that succinctly brought all findings into focus.
ROI Solutions differentiates its brand with a commitment to constant innovation, client collaboration, satisfaction, and support. We’re also a proudly independent, woman-owned company.
Bill came to the table at the first discovery session with a few compositions of the ROI Solutions brand suite logos. A few days after our first discovery session, he created a concept with bold and modern typography, vibrant colors, and iconography in a simple composition that later became our logo.
Collaboration + Refinement
Product names were further detailed and supported with strategic taglines created by the team. I produced the new company tagline, with the expansion of The heart of our brand promise, “Change the World with Your Data.” Together with the team, we iterated and agreed on each product logo’s color and icons that Bill created and formalized the new ROI Solutions suite of brand logos.
“Gina has a gift to quickly ingest many disparate perspectives and content and rapidly produce a succinct and unified message.”
Bill Bowman
Owner & Creative Director at
Bowman Design + Direction
Symbolism
Our logos were crafted with a focus on simplicity and modernity. We wanted a clean, professional design, yet bold and dynamic, representing our forward-thinking approach to data management.
The logo’s elements were carefully illustrated to symbolize the key aspects of our brand. The interconnected shapes reflect the seamless integration of our services, emphasizing our ability to connect data, technology, and strategy to drive results for our clients. The color palette, a blend of vibrant and stable hues, represents our balance of innovation and reliability—a combination that our clients have come to trust. The palette also plays off the original colors in the ROI Solutions logo.
“Design resonates when it is more than just style—it’s strategy aligned with vision.”
Bill Bowman
Owner & Creative Director at
Bowman Design + Direction
The Revolution CRM product logo uses the heart icon constellation to symbolize managing supporter relationships and multiple constituent journeys.
The Unite Analytics logo depicts the unification of multiple analytic datasets identifying trends based on heart.
The Ignite Marketing logo amplifies and promotes campaigns based on heart throughout integrated marketing channels.
The MiLo Intelligence logo includes a cute machine-learning robot icon with an algorithm focused on heart, learning, scoring, and predicting constituent populations and outcomes. In the process, the MiLo robot has become our mascot.
“It took an outside perspective to help us through the entire process, but also to hold a mirror up so we could see who we really are, which is reflected in our identity..”
Gina VanderLoop
Founder and CEO
A Fresh Perspective
We’re still the same company, but the branding Bill helped us create better reflects our focus, sensibility, and essence. Everything—our website, letterhead, signage, press releases, newsletters, corporate swag, and presentation decks.
Bill’s contribution went beyond visuals—it was about building a strategic foundation to align our brand with our products and values. He developed wireframes that shaped our new website design and architecture, balancing SEO, usability, content hierarchy, development, site build, content and website management, and content marketing to ensure a seamless and engaging user experience. Our website has become more than just an online presence—it is now a strategic tool for engagement, growth, and reinforcing the essence of who we are.
From a CEO standpoint, every touchpoint now aligns to present a unified and consistent “look” and “feel.” This cohesive identity scales our marketing strategy and extends into Zoom backgrounds, social media branding, trade show booths, infographics, whitepapers, client stories, advertisements, and product user interfaces. Every element now reflects the same professionalism, history, and evolution, reinforcing our commitment to helping organizations unlock the full potential of their data.
“It was wonderful to collaborate with Gina VanderLoop and Derek Drockelman. Rarely does a client have the time or interest to contribute to content development. I call Gina and Derek my content champions as they contributed so many polished points of view filled with experience and know-how. I would create a strategy, collaborate towards consensus, write and design the first page of each section; next, Gina and Derek would run with it and finish writing dozens of well-crafted content posts.”
Bill Bowman
Owner & Creative Director at
Bowman Design + Direction
