If you've been following us for a while, you couldn't have missed it. Popina has had a makeover: website, stands, clothing, goodies, overall communication... the identity has radically changed. Why change identity? What were the thought and creation processes? 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 that you may/will have noticed.
Let's rewind to the beginning: Popina was born in 2013. "Natural" green was the main color, our customers were mostly restaurant owners, and the team consisted of four people in a 30 m² apartment. We're exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea! Back then, the identity was created by one of Popina's founders, inspired by the trends of the time. Our vision? A cold, minimalist visual identity for a modern and efficient tool. Our mantra? Popina adapts to your needs, not the other way around. So, the chosen green/white colors are reassuring, technical, (almost) sterile. We wanted our visual identity to "disappear" in favor of those of our restaurant clients. The logo, meanwhile, was designed to reflect their establishments. Minimalist, it's a typographic logo (with a twist on the dot of the "o") that represents a plate and a glass seen from above.
2019, revamp of the showcase site
Fast forward a bit: 2019, Popina is growing, and its services are expanding. The internet is changing, so we're adapting to all these developments by developing a new site. We started with the existing website to modernize it, and we extracted a few keywords to better tell our story. The showcase site has been redone, but overall, the visual identity remains. Illustrations are added and punctuate the pages to accentuate the storytelling*. The tone is lighter and reinforces the closeness we want to convey to our customers. *narration
State of affairs at Popina
4 years later: 2023, Popina in numbers.
Over 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 pool later... it's clear that Popina is evolving fast!
It's time to completely rethink our identity to communicate differently. Without disowning our old identities, this change reflects a desire to better match today's image and the one we want to project. Popina is evolving in a constantly changing digital world. We started with a single product, but now we offer our customers more than thirty connected products, services, and accessories. Checkout, HACCP hygiene,hotel PMS, table payment or even, digital tipping... so many features that can help you manage your business and that needed to be represented. The identity redesign process is launched!
Brainstorming & Brief
No redesign is possible without a brief and graphic research. And to begin with, we had to define who we are.
Step 1: Popina, what is it?
For highlight our core values ; we asked our employees. Popina, what does it mean to you in a few words? What do we do? What's our story? Who are we talking to? For this project, we selected 17 Popina employees from the company's various departments. The profiles were chosen to represent Popina as a whole (people with longer tenure and others who were hired more recently). What came out of it helped us to better target our needs and desires. Popina is a company in the tech**sector, young, family-oriented, dynamic and serious, offering digital services that are constantly evolving. Now we need to create a custom-made identity for it. **technology
Step 2: Establishing the brief
Our main focus was on thegraphic identity (new typography, logo modernization, color research), so that a new general visual identity, a website redesign, and associated global communication would follow. For Popina, we wanted above all to affirm our positioning, communicate our values, showcase our innovation, from the app to the development of our website. All thanks to a dynamic, modern and serious visual identity.
Step 3: Our inspirations & graphic issues
In our inspirations, several keywords emerged: "streetwear", "sport", "tech/digital" "pop", "neo"... Concepts that had to be transformed graphically and associated with our issues, so that everything works together. And by "issues" we mean the uses, variations, and supports where our visual identity will have to exist. Imagine a bright red, a choppy typography, angular pictograms... All these graphic elements scream the same thing: "attention, danger". So many parameters to take into account when establishing a new graphic identity. We reviewed our old visual identity. What do we keep as is? What do we modernize, upgrade? What do we rework? In short: a little old, a little new, for a joyful visual mix.
The logo
At Popina, we really like our typographic logo. It represents what we are and how we started. We wanted to keep it simple, minimalist and effective. Especially since our customers, partners and employees know it well. Modernize yes, but without completely transforming ourselves, we wanted to be recognized.
The font
No secrets here, until now, we had opted for Myriad Pro. And if you're not familiar with its name, it's a "one-size-fits-all" font. A "clear and perfectly neutral font", if we even believe its Wikipedia page. 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 must work as well on print as on the web, they must stand out from our competitors, they must be seen from far at trade shows, they must not change depending on the printing qualities... The ideas are launched, after having determined the values of the company, established the brief and carried out the graphic watch (while keeping in mind our problems); it is our (incredible) team of graphic designers who took over.
The changes to the visual identity
It's here, it's beautiful, you know it, you're browsing it. Welcome to our new websiteimprinted with our new visual identity! So what does Popina 2.3 look like?
An updated logo…
…That still feels familiar. We're not just talking to restaurant owners or the hospitality sector anymore*. Now, we can equip all kinds of businesses and want to represent them all. The logo is bolder. By adding the point on the "o" in the logo, we've made it more dynamic, it looks like it's moving. The idea was to use it as much as possible, to adapt it endlessly, to play with it like a pattern, like on our office window film, for example.
We played with the logo, with its transparency. It lets light into some rooms and dims others. Our inspiration: street art. Arrow, rocket, adaptability – that's the energy we want to convey. By pushing the concept further, we could even evoke the future of Popina, the ever-present innovation in our business, and our ambitions for the future. 🚀
A unique typography
The typography we use 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 foundations. For the rest of our materials, we opted for SPACE GROTESK. Like Sofia Pro, it's a sans-serif, unique font designed by Florian Karsten in 2018. With its "monospace" characters, it reminds us of the digital, tech world. We wanted it to be reassuring, bold, yet adaptable and accessible. With both fonts, we maintain a spirit of closeness!
Striking colors
The colors have been rethought. Bye-bye "natural" green. Hello electric blue! We opted for a "catchy" main color that works well alone or in combination with black and beige, our secondary colors. Blue is dynamic and inspires confidence and serenity. Black is direct and reassuring. Beige is our "stable" color, the neutral color that soothes the eye.
New identity, for endless possibilities
The website redesign was essential to explain our many products and services. We hope you'll get used to these navigation changes and, more generally, to this new identity that's taking shape throughout the pages. On the trade showside, our stands are now blue & wood, for more warmth and friendliness! The graphic charter is used in every nook and cranny. The arrow on the floor echoes the point of our logo, and the goodies are marked "Popina." We even had a cart made with skateboard wheels that moves as we want. It evokes our mobility and the "street" side that we liked so much. Finally, because our employees are our best ambassadors, we've designed a unisex streetwear line for them in organic cotton. Sweatshirts and T-shirts, the collection is beige to soften the blue of the stands. At Popina, seriousness, comfort & chill come first!
We can't wait to read or hear your reactions, and more surprises are coming. Popina new version, mission accomplished? Convinced by our new identity? Want to know (even) more about Popina?
