Radian was already a well established force in mortgage insurance when it started homegenius, a company whose sights were on innovating for the entire real estate industry through a combination of data science, AI technology, services, and relationships that were decades deep.
After a few years of building and growing homegenius products and services, it was time to unwind the tape on product branding and reorganize around a more unified primary brand family structure that would affect naming, logo system, color palette and brand story. It was time to articulate the larger vision driving everything: an ecosystem of real estate products and services that would bring every piece of the transaction together in ways no other company had dared nor was prepared to do.
Building a bigger brand strategy
It quickly became clear that homegenius was not just another tech vendor building products for real estate businesses. This team not only had a vision for a much larger ecosystem of products, services, data and people, but also had the industry experience and decades of relationships it would take to pull it off. For the first time ever, we saw firsthand a vision for transforming the industry for the better for everyone, from within, instead of the usual “disruption” from outside that so many tech folks had brought to real estate in the past.
We built a brand foundation that reflected this vision, positioning, and point of origin. Our big idea became one of transformation, connection and possibility, not disruption. And these themes drove a lot of the design work that followed.
The look of a bold vision
Brand identity work doesn’t always have to start with a new logo. In this case, we inherited the homegenius logo, but optimized it and refined it to reflect our new brand story and big idea of possibility. We brought in a celebrated typographer to redraw the wordmark from scratch to improve the fundamental shapes without losing the spirit of the original. Then we defined the dots over the ‘g’ and ‘i’ as connection points, reinforcing the idea that homegenius is a digital ecosystem where people connect.
We think the fine tuning and tailoring made all the difference in this case.
Architecting the entire family
Homegenius includes a vast roster of products and services. Part of our design charge was to develop a brand architecture system to organize the various products around a unifying “primary brand” structure. This family structure encompassed naming conventions, the logo system, and the color palette.
Color coding
A color system that worked beautifully together, but could also be deployed by audience segment to create distinction, was integral to the strategy behind the brand architecture.
Clouds
Multiple audiences join together in the homegenius ecosystem. So to visualize this, we introduced a series of color ‘clouds’ as a primary brand element. Each cloud picks up one dominant color from the brand palette. The clouds illustrate the myriad connections we foster made possible in a digital space.
Photo style
We employed a narrative, black-and-white photo style to tell a story. Somewhat dramatic and reminiscent of film photography, this style sparks interest, elicits emotion, and stands apart from competitors.
Website
Our work extended into the homegenius website itself with an extensive and comprehensive content strategy plan designed for user empathy. Because homegenius serves four separate audiences with this site, we reorganized the navigation experience to be persona-first, rather than product-first. We did this by developing a top nav ‘mega menu’ system for users to quickly find the products that solve for their particular needs.
The content strategy required us to design a comprehensive suite of dynamic components to account for both immediate needs, and future scenarios, for this rapidly growing enterprise.
