The Node
Information
Play bigger
The Node is an influencer marketing agency based in France, working mostly on Twitch and YouTube with gaming and streaming talents. After five years, they needed a change.
The concept everything hangs on: Play bigger. Push creators, communities and brands to play, and bet, bigger on influence.
Credits
- Agency
- La Rampe
- Creative direction
- Raphaël Auriac
- Brand design
- Achille Ernoult, Raphaël Auriac
- Web design
- Evan Fasquelle
- Webflow & front-end
- Jim Zona
- Motion design
- Raphaël Auriac
- Iconography
- Achille Ernoult
- Customer success
- Inès Rzouga
Categories
Brand design, Iconography
thenode.gg
Overview
What I took from all the workshops run alongside the brand and the people behind it: creating links was central. And they had this urge to transcend it a little, to really step up. That's the kind of link-making we tried to put into this identity, and it's the thread I kept pulling on, from the logo down to the icons.
Icon set
Then the icons. Coming back to every single one, customising them, building a whole custom series for what The Node actually uses, and folding them into the typeface, made to measure. Same duality as the type: a border radius, and an edge that's a bit harder.
I think it's the part I enjoyed most. So, so good to rework. The stake was big: a small family of icons that could sit in the font almost natively, as if they were bonus characters, bonus glyphs. They also exist in a dot version.
It was really stimulating to push, to go a bit deeper into that world, into that discipline, iconography. And I have to admit, they went down really well.
The mark
The logo is, I think, what sparked the most debate internally. And the most work, for such a small sign in the end. We went through a lot of concepts. A lot.
What mattered, what we really wanted to hold on to, was this idea of links going in every direction. And if we could get close to an abstract shape forming an N, that mattered too, to keep a bit of the old logo's influence. I found that really interesting.
It's also how I tend to see a rebrand. I don't think you have to wipe the slate clean: there's good to be found almost everywhere. Something made the team and the partners vibrate for a while, and I'd rather rebuild from that than leave it out of the final vision. So we started again from the old logo, but not graphically. We only kept a concept: two shapes answering each other and an N, coming out of them.
There were a lot of drafts. One big board covered in ideas, Raphaël's and mine, hand sketches and screen sketches. This is the shape we kept, and chose to push.
You can read a lot into it. A flag, an N, a hyphen, a link in a chain, a connection icon. I'm fine with all of them.
The type
Once the logo was there, the question became: what typeface lifts it? We landed on Britti Sans, drawn by Guillermo Lizarzuay at Nois, a studio in Barcelona. A modern grotesque, very geometric, rooted in industrial design, and yet it keeps something joined and smooth.
That's what caught me. I loved the idea of taking “creating links” literally and applying it to letters: discreet roundings in places you don't expect them. And I started seeing our starting concept in it, translated graphically: the link between brands and creators, between brands and communities, between all of them. Something that goes beyond the sum of its parts. Crazy collabs. Gaming taking up more and more room until it becomes a lifestyle, a culture. I'm not saying everyone will read that, but it's what I had in my head.
It's made for display, for titles and numbers, and there's a lot to play with. Beyond that, it hands us a whole graphic territory. It anchors the duality we were already chasing, hard corners against rounded ones, radius against no radius, shape against counter-shape. One more anchor, and it gives the system more weight and more sense. I'm really happy with that pairing.
Colours
When we started thinking about all this, the question was simple: what colours, what mood? We chose to play the two colours all the way. A purple leaning toward blue, and a yellow.
And we're really proud we got that yellow adopted. Very, very electric, very powerful. I think it works great as a background, like just above, with its shapes and counter-shapes. It brings energy and something new, and it resonates with who they are.
Both hold as flat colour and both take gradients, so the system moves between blocks and blends. Halftone screens come in on some media and stay out of others. That keeps the loud parts loud.
Agency — [La Rampe](https://www.larampe.io/) Creative direction — Raphaël Auriac Brand design — Achille Ernoult, Raphaël Auriac Web design — Evan Fasquelle Webflow & front-end — Jim Zona Motion design — Raphaël Auriac Iconography — Achille Ernoult Customer success — Inès Rzouga
