Our Brand

Proposition

We specialise in helping brands, organisations and governments into future territories

By delivering Strategic Foresight, we ensure clients take full advantage of what’s next. Powered by deep data, award-winning creativity, technical innovation, local awareness and global reach, we are perfectly positioned to deliver success both today and tomorrow.

How we communicate is of the utmost importance. These guidelines will provide information and inspiration so we can best represent ourselves.

Core Elements

We protect our brand the same way we protect our clients. To help you build communications in line with Crowd’s visual identity, you’ll find all the artwork files you need in the downloads section.

Logos

The megaphone device is our calling card.

This simple image used both individually and as part of our wordmark is our most recognisable asset.

Using our logos

The alternative use of our wordmark and the Megaphone by itself allows the flexibility for us to appear open, sophisticated and modern while maintaining our core brand.

Our logos are designed to be clean, consistent, refined and balanced, so please only use approved logo artwork from the downloads section. There are also just a few simple rules to keep them looking perfect wherever they appear.

On white, use the black / orange logo or the orange megaphone
On black, use the white / orange logo or the orange megaphone
On a light colour, use the black logo or the black megaphone
On a dark colour, use the white logo or the white megaphone

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It’s important to give our logos some breathing room, so wherever possible and practical we allow a decent amount of space between the logo or device and any other visual element. The space allowed on each side should be at least 50% of the width of the megaphone device.

The exceptions to this rule are where the space doesn’t allow, for instance; a small format banner or mobile site design, or where the megaphone device is being used creatively.

Using the megaphone creatively

When we wish to inject some personality into our visual language, we can use the megaphone device in a more characterful way; a graphic element in a montage, a frame or mask in a composite image or movie, or even as the hero in a 3d animated piece. Any creative use of the megaphone can be expressive and playful but should still be sophisticated and faithful to the original device, such as in the examples that follow.

Chinese Logo

The Crowd Chinese logo introduces a couple of Chinese characters to our current logo. The first Chinese character matches the ‘Crowd’ meaning in English – a group of people. The second character has four meanings – 1) talented people, elites; 2) the best part of an objective; 3) in ancient China, it refers to jade which is used to describe things that are beautiful and crystal; and 4) it means ‘Great Britain’.

The combination of all these elements within Crowd’s Chinese logo translates to: a group of elites from Great Britain who can help brands grow globally.

Arabic Logo

The Crowd Arabic logo shares the same megaphone brand element and colours from the Crowd core logo, but has its own identity provided by Arabic characters in a different lock-up.

Colour

Orange symbolises energy, vitality and excitement - and reflects our passion to produce stand-out work. It’s been our hero colour since we began, and is part of our DNA.

As we move forward into a global future, the Crowd orange will be supported by a palette of other colours. These colours are designed to enhance our primary colour, not replace. Therefore, we always ensure the presence of Orange on all of our visual communications, either within the composition or by the use of our logo.

Core Palette

Orange

HEX	#fe5c01
RGB	254,92,1
CMYK	0,74,94,0
Pantone	Orange 021

Black

HEX	#090a11
RGB	9, 10, 17
CMYK	76, 70, 63, 83
Pantone	426 C

Blue

HEX	#0044d8
RGB	0, 68, 216
CMYK	88, 75, 0, 0
Pantone	Blue 072 C

White

HEX	#ffffff
RGB	255,255,255
CMYK	0,0,0,0

Neutral Palette

HEX	#3f4257
RGB	63, 66, 87
CMYK	77, 70, 44, 33

HEX	#5b5d72
RGB	91, 93, 114
CMYK	68, 60, 38, 1

HEX	#9A9BAE
RGB	154, 155, 174
CMYK	42, 35, 22, 0

HEX	#c6c6d8
RGB	198, 198, 216
CMYK	21, 18, 6, 0

HEX	#E4E5F1
RGB	228, 229, 241
CMYK	9, 7, 1, 0

HEX	#F1F2F9
RGB	241, 242, 249
CMYK	4, 3, 0, 0

Colour palettes for Adobe CS and Figma are available in the downloads section.

Voice

How Crowd speaks

As an internationally respected global agency, Crowd speaks with authority, clarity, and positivity. We speak with a global audience in mind, and inspire confidence, trust and partnership. Everything we write is driven by a purpose, and designed to keep the reader engaged. Our tone of voice is no different to our campaigns – intelligent, crafted, and effective.

Tone of Voice Example 1
Tone of Voice Example 2
Tone of Voice Example 3
Tone of Voice Example 4

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Crowd should always be called 'Crowd'

Even though our URL is ‘thisiscrowd.com’, when we talk or write about the company we are always ‘Crowd’ – never ‘This is Crowd’, ‘Crowd Ltd.’ or even ‘This is Crowd Ltd.’

Our Values

We are a global collective of talented people working together towards common goals. To reflect and support our aims, we’ve established a set of values to guide us:

Be passionate about quality – Create award winning work

Take responsibility – Be accountable for our work

Think sustainably – Always aim to lessen our negative impact on the world

Cooperate and collaborate – Communication is key

Respect each other – We are a global team

Work towards your personal goals everyday

Represent – Be a Crowd ambassador

Challenge yourself and your team – Get outside of your comfort zone and learn

Work smart – Help yourself and others to be productive

Be commercially minded – Everyone benefits when we hit our commercial goals

Be positive and contribute – We all have valuable ideas, experiences and expertise

…and have fun! 🙂

Our typefaces

The typefaces we use reflect our bold personality and clear communicative approach

Crowd is a global organisation which communicates in many different languages, so we have selected our typefaces to best serve those languages, for legibility and balance. For Western/European Languages, we use Aeonik Pro, for other languages we use Noto Sans, developed by Google with the aim to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel. Where it is not possible to use Aeonik Pro or Noto Sans, for example on Google Docs, we use Montserrat as our fallback typeface.

Out of the box these typefaces are clean, clear and forthright, but where a little more character is required, they can be used in more of an artful, typographic layout.

Files for all of our fonts are available in the downloads section.

Aeonik Pro

We use Aeonik Pro as our main font – It’s clean and crisp, versatile, honest and easy on the eye – just like us.

We allow Aeonik Pro room to breathe, a small amount of tracking and a decent amount of leading makes it legible, easy on the eye and aids comprehension. It also helps create a sense of balance and harmony in our designs.

Montserrat - Our trusty fall-back

It’s not ideal, but sometimes we have to produce material on platforms that don’t support our preferred typefaces. Platforms such as Microsoft Office and Google Suite are quite restrictive with font use and embedding but we still need to look as good as we can.

In this case we use Montserrat which is available by default on almost all platforms and operating systems.

These options should be considered ONLY where our preferred fonts are not practicable.

Language typefaces

In instances where the text is in a different language, we use the font Noto Sans. This has been developed by Google and aims to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel.

If we need a new Noto Sans font family for a new language, please go to this site and search for the new language required: Google Noto Typeface

Chinese
Arabic

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Illustration

We employ montage and layering to bring personality to our service offering and expertise.

Much of our communication deals with complicated or abstract concepts that can’t be easily represented photographically. To help bring these subjects to life, we use a montage illustration style which combines flat colour fields, tinted photographic cut-outs, geometric graphics and abstract 3d elements. This approach allows us some flexibility in terms of layout and the ability to combine disparate objects and concepts into the intended message of the image. And while our core colours don’t need to be featured in every illustration, we should consider how these illustrations sit within our branded environment.

Sample illustrations to use for guidance are available in the downloads section.

Hero Illustration Example
Infographic Example
Hero Illustration Example
Cameo Illustration Example
Infographic Example
Cameo Illustration Example

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Photography

Our choice of photography is thoughtful and used with purpose.

Where we employ photography it will often be from disparate sources; client images, documentary images of an event, smartphone shots or even selfies. In cases where we need to source stock photography we should be judicious in our choices so that these images align with our proposition and standards around quality and taste-level. How we curate, crop and present all of these 3rd party images is key.

In the case where we are creating photography ourselves we should always aim to tell the story of Crowd focusing on our values and our people, creating a consistent look that is honest, thoughtful and with intention.

Team Portraits

Crowd is nothing without it’s people, so when we show our team member portraits it’s important that they are consistent and high quality, but allow the individual to shine through. where we are showing professional portraits for instance, on the ‘meet the team’ page of our site or in a proposal document, these should be high quality ‘head and shoulders’ shots which have been composited in our portrait style.

The Crowd portrait style uses the subject placed on a consistent background, in black and white with a slight tint of our blue colour to add some richness.

A PSD template for this style is available in the downloads section.

Presenting Our Work

When we are presenting our work visually, in case-studies, social posts or credentials, it’s important that it is shown in the best light possible.

Where we are showing screen-grabs or video-caps of digital work on a device, we use a set of approved mock-up templates that give the work context without distracting from the work itself.

Artwork files for these templates are available in the downloads section.