stormcrow | case study
Website | www.stormcrow.ca
What do you do when you've spent your time, money, and resources, on branding your company - just to come across an unexpected and halting problem?
This is what happened to our client, StormCrow.

StormCrow is a company that forecasts sectors that don't receive much attention from broader capital markets.

They first came to us once they discovered an unexpected conflict with the design of their logo. When the Canadian-based company wanted to expand their business to the Asian market, they realized that in China, the crow/raven represents bad luck and unexpected news.

Even more, it's said that seeing a single crow is very unlucky while two crows means good luck. Unfortunately, the StormCrow logo featured a very vivid image of a single crow.
This is a historic note that should have been taken into consideration before moving forward with the initial branding. For hundreds of years, these birds (crows and ravens) have been used in many countries across the globe as a popular method of 'foretelling the future'. This can quickly limit StormCrow's ability to expand outside of Canada.

"Flocks of birds (crows, ravens) often fly ahead of large storms, signaling the storm's approach. People once believed that large flocks of these birds signified change - such as the impending death of a king. Our aim is to use our extensive expertise and experience to keep our readers and clients ahead of change, while helping them take full advantage of the volatility in the critical materials, and technology markets.Stormcrow provides industry specific and company specific research, as well as consulting services to public and private companies." - StormCrow Team

And so, due to this cultural superstition, it wouldn't have been a smart business-decision to sell a service from a company with a name that's associated with such negative attention.

Regardless, StormCrow decided they wanted to change their logo without having to change their name. This meant finding a design that would subtly feature the crow.

initial sketches

In order to help StormCrow, we started by including the crow as part of the 'O' in order to make the image of the bird more subtle. We chose a simple but bold font as it represents confidence in the industry, and we chose an orange font as it triggers thoughts of warmth and creativity while remaining highly-visible to the viewers' eye.

These are all positive emotions that we want to connect between the consumer to the brand.

After StormCrow was happy with the new logo, they were excited to move forward with a complete redo of the StormCrow website. We got straight to work and made the website to match the theme and overall tone of the previously designed logo.

We used the same orange colour, the same font, and the same theme in order to tie the whole brand together with a new and modern look (that's appropriate across the globe).

We added large, high-quality images, better organized the menu and website layout, added credible brand names to the homepage, and so much more.

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