WE ARE

A brand for the world’s first family history social network and publishing platform

WeAre is the world’s first socially-connected family history platform, giving genealogists and family historians a place to archive, collate, organise, publish and share their own immersive, interactive and ever-growing family story.

Originally called ‘Yo! Family’ the product offer was clear, but how to bring it all to life, and to market, wasn’t. Our task was to create a clear strategy and a new name and identity that would help build the brand as a serious tool for genealogists, as well as helping to capture the imaginations of their families, friends and a wider general audience.

Services
Strategy
Naming
Visual identity
Verbal identity
Bespoke logo
Web design
Iconography

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Collaborators
Marketing consultant—Carl Mesner Lyons
Consultant—Simon Veingard
Motion—Paraform

In a world of sepia, be the colour…
As a completely new offer, the brand needed to quickly carve a space for itself in a well established, popular and crowded market – but a market dominated by clichéd symbols of trees and leaves (a well-worn play on the ‘family tree’), sepia photos and yellowing old documents.

The aim was to disrupt that predictable pattern by bringing some much needed colour, energy and life to people’s life stories.

Genealogy in the genes
The strategy and creative direction were driven by a key user insight into genealogy itself: that the attraction for many genealogists is in the hunt – the quest of tracking down people, places and stories, and of solving some of the past’s many mysteries. At its heart, genealogy is a compelling on-going and unending quest through the often hazy and incomplete mists of time to discover just who we are…

And so, ‘WeAre’ was born.

WeAre from a long line of fisherman Ad Campaign

WeAre…
Through an extensive naming process, we developed a name that is the purest distillation of this idea: an open ended question designed to inspire an answer, and to be answered time and again. It is an integral part of both the visual and verbal identity, infinitely adaptable to each user and each story told, and flexing to brand messaging and targeted communications.

As the name flexes to allow itself to be answered, infinitely adaptable to each family, so the custom drawn logotype adapts to become an active and functional element of the identity. The symbol, an ellipsis in square brackets – a recognised shorthand for ‘more to come’– expands and contracts to change with the messaging.

The visual system we created is also driven by this core idea: amorphous shapes and colours fade in and out of focus to represent the nebulous, often hard to define and ever shifting nature of genealogy – sometimes the task is hazy and the story is blurred, while at other times things come into sharp focus as the answers reveal themselves. This shifting world of colour and shape is then combined with a precise clarity: sharp typography and clean design principles help to deliver a focussed and clear user experience.

As well as developing the overarching visual system, we also worked closely with the development team to create the design of the website and UI kit; rationalising the complex family tree system, which is both illustrative and a core part of the platform’s navigation; creating a bespoke suite of icons; and helping to define the user experience of the story editor and page builder.

Tomorrow’s history today
Uniquely in this category, WeAre is not simply focused on the past but also on the future too: preserving stories for generations to come, while helping users to share their research in real time and also encouraging them to document the present as it happens – tomorrow’s history in the making. We needed to ensure that the brand reflected this by creating a unique home for history while always facing forward.

WeAre brings innovative functionality and powerful tools to the dedicated genealogist, while being simple to use and easy to share for the entire family. It is a showcase for where we’ve come from, what made us and who we are. It is a bright, positive and vivid archive for the future.

Because we’ll all be someone’s ancestors one day, whoever we are.