Swappa brand identity
- Who
Creative director for Swappa, a peer-to-peer marketplace for second-hand electronics
- What
A brand identity system to fit the marketplace's growing options
- How
Iteration and opening wide the visual concepts already present
- Impact
Legitimized non-phone categories, which grew from 2 to 10+ and increased total year-end seller proceeds by 20% in 2018 alone
- Creative direction
- Art direction
- Graphic design
Brief
Swappa is an online marketplace for consumer tech. Customers become power users thanks to a curated catalog, active support, and bold price transparency.
Swappa's success exposed the seams of its company identity. It wasn't a small market for smartphones anymore, despite what the logo depicted. As the catalog grew in scope, Swappa's outreach didn't scale with it. Our challenge was to redefine Swappa’s brand with this growth in mind. The resulting system upholds the team's vision and generates new energy for "newish" electronics.
After various workshops and community engagement, we found that the Swappa team and its community alike "bleed green," a fan-like spirit of helping hands offered between coworkers, given to customers, and between buyers and sellers themselves.
Our concept of commonplace connectivity celebrated this neighborly sentiment through a fun and accessible take on shopping for tech. We found inspiration in the shopping we do together; the bold but memorable simplicity of friendly supermarkets, corner conbini, and other brands whose wares are found for a great deal. Ultimately the exercise aimed to produce a fuzzy energy that softened the edge of "innovation" used by product brands on our marketplace to highlight the people-to-people support Swappa is known for.
To match this energy, we emboldened Swappa Green with a grander and fuller hue, and added a secondary blue and yellow to give the brand a wider base where it might normally choose monochrome. Setting the logo and display type in The Northern Block's Neusa Next family enhanced the disarming nerdy charm of Swappa's inviting voice while providing new tones with the expanded set of weights and widths.
The chosen direction upcycled Swappa's previous logo silhouette to show both the sharing of used tech and the flow of help moving through different hands. The Sprite is both a mark and mascot of sorts—an idea the Swappa team enjoyed. Named after video game graphics, the Sprite can express a variety of emotions from its eyes and shape.
Even used tech is new to its next owner. We celebrated the moment of “unboxing” with a confetti motif built from the Sprite’s core shapes. The motif can make playful backgrounds, draw the eye around a scene, and explode into the moment with shoppers' new gear.
All together, the new identity shed Swappa of its Android-centric roots while maintaining a continuity in its core logo, energizing and expanding the identity's capabilities to humanize tech, and doubling down on the friendly, everyday fun to be had as customers, community members, and teammates across the Swappa family.
The 2018 identity rollout featured updates across sub-brands, social channels, ad programs, and the website core design system. Unlocking the needed catalog flexibility allowed the team to double available non-phone categories that year (now 10+ as of 2024), increasing total year-end total seller proceeds by 20% to $92M.
Swappa is evolving, iterating; not resetting. Our search for a new logo isn’t because of a pivot, or a major round of funding, or because “everything” has changed. Our mission is the same now as it was in the beginning, to make it safe and easy to buy and sell gently used tech. We’re just going to do it better. This logo represents that beautifully.
