If you've been following us for a while, you can't have missed it. Popina has given itself a makeover: website, stands, clothing, goodies, global communication... the identity has changed radically. Why change your identity? What were the thought and creation processes involved? What's next for Popina? New look for a new life, we reveal all the reasons for this 360° turn 😉. Zoom in on our history, our desires, our needs, our inspirations and the major changes you've seen/will see.
Let's take the story from the beginning: Popina was born in 2013. Nature" green is predominant, our customers are mainly restaurateurs, and the team consists of four people in a 30 m² apartment. We're deliberately overstating the case, but you get the idea! At the time, the identity had been imagined by one of Popina's dads, inspired by the fashion of the time. Our vision? A cool, minimalist visual identity for a modern, effective tool. Our mantra? Popina adapts to your needs, not the other way around. The green/white colors we chose are reassuring, technical and (almost) sanitized. We wanted our visual identity to be "forgotten" in favor of those of our restaurant customers. The logo, meanwhile, is designed to reflect their establishments. Minimalist, it's a typographic logo (with a twist of the dot on the "o") that represents a plate and a glass seen from above.
2019, redesign of the showcase site
A small leap forward in time: 2019, Popina is growing, its services are expanding. The Internet is changing, so we're adapting to all these evolutions by developing a new site. We started with the existing website to modernize it and extracted a few key words to tell our story better. The showcase site was redesigned, but the overall visual identity remained the same. Illustrations have been added and punctuate the pages to accentuate the storytelling*. The tone is lighter and reinforces the proximity we want to transmit to our customers. *narration
State of Popina
4 years later: 2023, Popina in a few figures.
+ More than 5,000 customers, 40 employees, two offices (Paris and Barcelona), 5 trade shows/year, 11 new versions of the application, 4.5 stars on the App Store and 1,500 games of billiards later?
It's time to completely rethink our identity and communicate differently. Without denying our former identities, this change is part of a desire to better reflect today's image and the image we want to project. Popina is evolving in a constantly changing digital world. We started out with a single product, but now we offer our customers over thirty connected products, services and accessories. CollectionHACCP hygiene,Hotel PMSpayment at table or again, dematerialized tip... so many features that can help you manage your business, and that had to be represented. The identity redesign process has begun!
Brainstorming & Brief
No redesign is possible without a brief and graphic research. And to start, we had to define who we are.
Step 1: What is Popina?
For highlight our core values we asked our employees. Popina, in a few words, what is it for you? What do we do? What do we tell? Who is it for? For this project, we selected 17 Popina employees from the company's various divisions. The profiles were chosen to represent Popina as a whole (people with more seniority, and others more recently hired). What emerged enabled us to better target our needs and desires. Popina is a company in the tech**The company is young, family-oriented, dynamic and serious, and offers digital services that are constantly evolving. We now need to create a custom identity for it. **technology
Step 2: Establish the brief
Our main focus was thegraphic identity (new typography, logo modernization, color research), resulting in a new overall visual identity, a redesigned site, and associated global communications. For Popina, we wanted above all to assert our position, communicate our values, demonstrate our innovation, from the app' to the development of our website. All this, thanks to a dynamic, modern and serious visual identity.
Step 3: Our inspirations & graphic issues
In our inspirations, several key words emerged: "streetwear", "sport", "tech/digital", "pop", "neo"... Concepts that we had to transform graphically, and associate with our issues, so that everything worked together. And by "issues" we mean the uses, the variations, the media where our visual identity will have to exist. Imagine bright red, choppy typography, angular pictograms... All these graphic elements shout the same thing: "caution, danger". These are all parameters that need to be taken into account when creating a new corporate identity. We reviewed our old visual identity. What do we keep as it is? What do we modernize or upgrade? What do we rework? In a nutshell: a little of the old, a little of the new, for a cheerful visual mishmash.
The logo
At Popina, we like our typographic logo. It represents who we are and how we started. We wanted to keep it simple, minimalist and effective. Especially since our customers, partners and collaborators know it well. We wanted to modernize, yes, but without completely transforming ourselves, we wanted to be recognized.
Typeface
No secret between us, until now, we opted for the Myriad Pro. And if you're not familiar with its name, you should know that it's a "go-to" font. A "clear and perfectly neutral font", according to its Wikipedia entry. Not ideal when you want to assert yourself: this will be our first project!
The colors
And what about the choice of colors? It's crucial! They have to work equally well in print and on the web, stand out from our competitors, be visible from a distance at trade shows, and not change according to the quality of the print... The ideas are launched, after determining the company's values, establishing the brief and carrying out the graphic watch (while keeping our issues in mind); our (incredible) team of graphic designers took over.
Changes to the visual identity
It is there, it is beautiful, you know it, you navigate on it. Welcome to our new websitewith our new visual identity! So Popina 2.3, what does it look like?
A modernized logo...
... which takes up the codes of the old. We're no longer focusing solely on the restaurant and catering sector*. From now on, we want to represent all the sectors and trades we can equip. The logo is more distinctive. With the addition of the point on the "o" of the logo, we've given it more dynamism; it seems to move. The idea was to use it as much as possible, to make infinite use of it, to play with it as a motif, as on our office window decals, for example.
We played with the logo and its opacity. It brings light into some rooms, screening others. Our inspiration: street art. Arrow, rocket, adaptability - that's the energy we want to convey. Taking the concept further, we could even talk about Popina's future, the omnipresent innovation of our business and our ambitions for the future. 🚀
A singular typography
The typography we're using for the logo is SOFIA PRO, a sans-serif font designed by Olivier Gourvat. Straightforward and pragmatic, it brings modernity to the logo without changing its fundamentals. For the rest of our materials, we opted for SPACE GROTESK. Like Sofia Pro, it's a singular sans-serif font designed by Florian Karsten in 2018. With its "monospace" typeface, it reminds us of the digital, tech world. We wanted it to be reassuring and distinctive, yet adaptable and accessible. With both fonts, we're keeping the spirit of proximity alive!
Sharp colors
The colors have been rethought. Bye-bye "nature" green. Hello electric blue! We've opted for a "flashy" main color that works well on its own or in combination with black and beige, our secondary colors. Blue is dynamic, inspiring confidence and serenity. Black is directive, reassuring. Beige is our "stable" color, the neutral that soothes the eye.
New identity, for an infinity of possibilities
The redesign of the site was essential to explain our many products and services. We hope you'll be able to acclimatize yourself to these navigational changes and, more generally, to this new identity which is taking shape as you move through the pages. For loungesOur stands are now blue & wood, for more warmth and conviviality! The graphic charter is used in every corner. The arrow on the ground takes the point of our logo, the goodies are marked "Popina". We even made a cart with skateboard wheels that moves as you want. It evokes our mobility and the "street" side that we liked so much. Finally, because our employees are our best ambassadors, we have designed a line of streetwear for them, unisex, in ecocert cotton. Sweatshirts and t-shirts, the collection is beige, to soften the blue of the stands. At Popina, seriousness, comfort & chill above all!
We can't wait to read or hear your reactions, as more surprises are on the way. Popina's new version: a successful bet? Convinced by our new identity? Want to know (more) about Popina?
