Brave, Visionary, Honest, People-Centric: Refreshing the Forecast Brand

The only constant in today’s world is change. At Forecast, this is something we embrace as central to our existence. In fact, “change” drives Forecast’s vision as we seek to build a dynamic map for your business, one that continually adjusts to changes within your business and externally to guide you to the best outcomes. 

Change is important for Forecast as a brand as well. Our offerings advance, the world around us changes, and best practices for design evolve; as a brand, we must keep up. Our brand should fit who we are today, in the context of the world around us, as it is today.

We are in a new era of Forecast. We’re bigger and bolder than we once were. Our platform has grown a lot in the past few years, and we’re better able to serve our enterprise customers. We are a trusted brand among customers and Forecast fans. And yet our visual identity has been signalling “scrappy start-up” to people who didn’t know us. And we once were a “scrappy start-up”! But this no longer reflects our robust platform and rapidly scaling business.

So today, May 30, 2023, Forecast has introduced a new look and feel to our brand, along with a new website to complete the experience. 

Our approach

Towards the end of 2022, we brought on the brilliant Chloe Tang as our creative lead on the project. She ran several workshops with our executive team to refine our mission, vision, and core value props and to define our brand personality. Through that work, we identified our brand values as:

• Brave
• Visionary
• Honest
• People-Centric
  

A key consideration for the brand identity was differentiation. We are not in the same product category as basic project management tools, and our brand identity needs to reflect that. 

We also wanted to ensure brand consistency with our product, and so looked for themes that could be replicated across the marketing website and the product. This was well-timed alongside the launch of a new navigation system in the product.

In this exploration period, our research team also ran tests for the new website to ensure that it would be as easy as possible for people to find the information they need.

The results

Chloe worked through several different concepts, and ultimately we chose a direction inspired by our product. The Forecast platform is really the star of the show, so why not use it to inform the design? Connectivity was also a major inspiration for the design, as our purpose is to help organizations make smarter decisions by connecting their data, tools, and teams.

As a result, you’ll see:

1. Colors that conjure our brand attributes
Defined by harmonious blue with a splash of vibrant hues, the brand color palette provides accessibility, simplicity, and consistency throughout all brand communications.

2. Shapes that evoke our product

Geometric graphic devices that resemble project and resourcing plans take their form in bars of color and gradient, providing a consistent way to incorporate the brand colors into designs and resulting in a bold visual.

3. Product images that speak for themselves

No need to hide the good stuff. We use clean product screenshots to illustrate how powerful our platform is.

4. Bold typography that makes an impression
We chose Whyte Inktrap as our primary brand typeface, inspired by both its boldness and the Whyte family’s constant evolution. It enhances the depth of the brand’s visual expression.

5. A logo that carries us into the future 
The Forecast logo is made up of 2 elements: the symbol and the wordmark. The symbol has changed from our former hexagon shape to an element inspired by our product, consistent with the brand identity. The Forecast name has been updated to the Whyte typeface for consistency and also resembles our previous logo typeface to ensure a smooth transition.

A new era

We are excited for the next phase of our journey as a business. As we grow, we will continue to innovate and evolve both our product and our brand. We have a strong foundation to build upon, and we’re looking forward to whatever the future holds next. We hope you’ll join us!