Smarter, lighter, faster – the Joost Engines brand launch

Posted 6 years ago in brand identity, business start-ups

We often tackle projects which are from the same genre of business. For instance, it’s only natural that one interior design-industry project leads to another. Ditto the legal or financial sectors. Those guys in particular only trust you with work if you’ve got a track record in the field. Then, something completely different comes along. There’s a connection through our long-time client Longwall Ventures, but still. We’re talking about the outboard motor engines of speedboats. Introducing: the Joost Engines brand launch.

Joost’s launch identity

Very much a case of ‘…is it a bird…?’, the Joost logo is intended to be both letter J and swift-flying friend.

We had been working on a variety of concept icon ideas around the use of the letter ‘J’ and one of them had this birdlike quality leading me to ask – could that icon resemble a bird specifically, intentionally? Wouldn’t that be rather good for something small, fast and lightweight? And that’s how it happened.

The core proposition of Joost as an invention is that it’s not only powerful but genuinely portable in a way that outboard motors haven’t been for many years. Probably ever. Of course you can lift a huge Four Winns engine, but realistically that’s going to involve two people at the very least. This is something completely different.

In short, Joost is a bird of a very different feather.

How do you design something without anything to start with?

This is a challenge we often face. While daunting in the first instance, necessity quickly becomes the mother of invention. No copy, no structure, no imagery – but a site has to happen. And it is up to us to figure out how.

Our first step is brainstorming a site structure which in turn generates ideas of what sort of information we think should be presented on the site.

With that and a brand design in hand, we work on concept visuals. A good answer here here was the idea of using imagery of water in the background with our new brand graphics over the top.

The moment when Ollie was able to produce these fantastic visual renderings of the engine using our colours was a huge turning point and the whole project took shape.

So while our work is by definition design, sometimes the brief on how a site should look and what the content should be is created by us, the reverse of what might usually be expected.

Website design for the Joost Engines brand launch

Web design for Joost

Central to the launch of Joost was their initial online presence. As discussed above, there was much discussion at the outset about exactly how advanced this piece of work needed to be. A single page? Something more expansive?

In the end the decision was made to go with the larger site-map. As it happens, the team behind the project are launching it with one eye very much on the future. There are various elements of the launch website (as is often the way with projects we work on) which will be implemented over time. So taking a mid-term view worked well here.

The launch site is comprehensive. Covering both the background to the creation of the engine itself as well as its first iteration as an outboard, the design uses a series of long, detailed pages to showcase the concept engine.

For now the pages use incredibly detailed, high resolution renderings of the engine. They certainly look the part and will be replaced with photographs soon enough. But considering the engine itself is being constructed in a series of prototypes, I reckon the renderings work particularly well.