At Sauce, we’ve used the same logo, colours, typography, and visual elements for over six years. During this time, we’ve grown significantly, expanding both our team and the scale of our projects. We've also evolved into a business that values staff wellbeing. Above all, we take our clients' ideas, time, and security seriously.

A Growing Team and Expanding Skills

A diverse team with skills in UX/UI design, technical support, development, operations, QA, and HR. We also partner with Ron Dearing UTC and support trainees.

What Makes Us Special: Our People

Through years of working on diverse projects, we realised our people make us unique. Their expertise, problem-solving abilities, and consistent delivery of quality software change lives. We value UX not just as a process, but as a culture that drives improvement across our team. It’s a continuous process with tangible benefits in our projects.

Time for a Refresh

We felt that our identity no longer reflected our growth. It lacked elements that represented our evolving team and values. So, we decided it was time for a refresh—not a reset. The aim was to retain our established aesthetic while addressing pain points and enhancing areas that fell short.

Setting Expectations and Involving the Team

We wanted the whole team to feel involved in the refresh. To make this happen, we created clear ground rules for participation. Designers felt responsibility, but the wider team wanted to contribute too.

Our Refresh Goals

We set out several goals for the refresh:

  • Add more colour to our identity while maintaining our established base colours.
  • Focus on people in our visual identity and give them a voice.
  • Expand our identity to include marketing materials and social networks with clear usage guidelines.

Laying the Groundwork for Change

To start, we created focus groups with designers and key stakeholders (The Chiefs) to set expectations and milestones. This helped us gather valuable input through internal surveys and meetings, asking questions like:

  • Can you relate to the Sauce identity?
  • Does it feel like it belongs to you?
  • What do you think our identity says about us?
  • What are our core values?
  • Have you encountered something you didn’t like?

We also identified problematic areas in our existing visual elements, such as:

  • Confusion over when to use certain colours in marketing materials, presentations, and documents.
  • Legibility issues with our logo at smaller sizes.
  • A lack of personality in our font.
  • Unclear direction with our photography.

Logo, Fonts, and Colours: Key Elements of the Refresh

We began with our logo, fonts, and colours.

The logo was unique and recognisable but needed to be more legible at smaller sizes. We also wanted to avoid the logo resembling coding brackets, as we’re no longer a start-up, but an SMO with a diverse skillset. Our refreshed logo is based on the old design but is simplified for better legibility and versatility.

A Bold New Look for Our Logo

The new logo simplifies the brackets, making them less reminiscent of coding symbols. We made the logo bolder to ensure clarity at smaller sizes and defined its usage across different variations.

Sauce logo's old and new
Left: Old Logo Set, Right: New refreshed logo set

Introducing Megat: A Font with Personality

Our font family, Gotham, served us well but lacked personality. We needed a second font to complement it, so we introduced Megat. Megat shares similar characteristics with Gotham but adds the flair we were missing.

Sauce typography old and new
Left: Old fonts comprising of Gotham only, Right: the newly introduced Megat font

Expanding Our Color Palette

Our original colour palette was black, white, and yellow with a hint of grey. But black, white, and yellow alone couldn’t capture the vibrancy of our team. To address this, we introduced three new accent colors based on yellow, following a triadic colour scheme. These colours complement our original palette and can be used in various combinations to enhance our visual identity.

Sauce colours old and new
Left: Our long established colours, Right: The introduction of four new accent colours

New Visual Elements and Photography

We also revamped our photography. While our team photos on the "Meet the Team" page were fun, they weren’t suitable for broader use. Over the years, we hired photographers to create a suite of imagery that better reflects our team’s personality. These images help humanize our brand and show the atmosphere in our office.

We also wanted our identity to extend into the office space. We collaborated with Spray Creative to design vibrant murals that bring our identity to life on the walls. This tactile approach added a layer of depth to our otherwise digital identity.

Sauce tone of voice
Above: See how we introduced the new colours as accents to our established base colours. Giving life to artwork, but always retaining the 'Sauce' aesthetic.
Sauce photography old and new
Left: Less art directed images that were inconsistent and hard to use throughout our website and marketing material. Right: Photography that compliments our tone of voice and was more curated, rather than spontaneous.
Sauce kitchen
Above: Our Kitchen Mural
Sauce posters and lab mural
Top Left, Bottom Left: Posters promoting our values, Right: Our Lab room's new mural.

Final Thoughts: Not a Reinvention, But an Evolution

Our identity refresh wasn’t about reinventing ourselves. It was about showing more emotion and character in everything we do. While we’ve evolved, we’ve stayed true to what makes us Sauce. We understand that relationships and perceptions are built on shared experiences and trust, and this refresh is our way of reinforcing that.