A New Brand to Kick off 20 Years of Function Point
Read time: 4 minutes
While the theory of committing 10,000 hours has mostly been debunked, there is something to be said about improvement through iterations. Our software is constantly evolving. Everyday, we’re working with customers, evaluating what’s working and what needs to change. Trying new things with the product is encouraged. A brand, on the other hand, doesn’t share that same freedom.
Great brands are consistent. You know them just by their colours, jingle, or typeface. There is value in familiarity. That’s why it was no small task when we decided to rebrand.
Today we unveil Function Point’s new brand. The rebrand wasn’t driven by a need for a shiny, new thing. It was driven by an opportunity to challenge how we’re perceived and a need to better align our visual identity with our company culture.
How did we start our rebrand? The same way we build our product by talking to our customers and employees. Figuring out what fits, what works, what doesn’t work anymore and what never did.
Why a rebrand?
Function Point has grown. What started in a Vancouver basement in 1997 has turned into a tool helping over 9,000 customers across the world grow their businesses. Keeping our current and future customers in mind, there was a need to evolve. And being honest with ourselves, the last brand refresh happened the same year Instagram was founded, Prince William married Kate Middleton and Justin Bieber looked like this.
Function Point direct mail advertisement, circa 1997
We’re bringing a new look to the brand, but we’re still holding strong to our product philosophy and culture. Function Point was created to help you better understand your business. Put simply, our mission is to help creative people in modern organizations be more productive and more profitable. In developing the new brand, we made a conscious decision to ensure that our company culture influences the new brand—and not the other way around.
In doing this rebrand we got a lot more than just a logo and some new colours. We got to reevaluate how we do business and how we speak to you. Of course, it’s always better to show rather than tell. So in our 20th year, we’re doing exactly that.
On the new visuals
“It looks like a sideways smiley face.”
“Does anyone else see a question mark?”
The new Function Point has more colours, vibrancy and a logo inspired by the graphs and charts found in the system. We wanted it to feel approachable and positive—two words, we feel accurately describes the Function Point team. And much to the marketing department’s amusement, it’s become a bit of an inkblot test for everyone.
You’ll also notice new colourful, geometrical shapes that match our logo. The shapes were designed to give our visuals some depth and to work across different channels. They represent how teams, while made up of unique individuals, work better together. Plus, we think they look really cool.
Making productivity more personable
Businesses are exponentially more complex than ever before. Even within small businesses, the exchange of digital communications is astounding with more emails, faster transactions and bigger files. With such a glut of activity, digital interactions have become more cold and impersonal, and productivity has suffered
We want to change that.
Reliable tools are great, but we found that our customers want reliable partners. Tools don’t listen. They don’t have empathy or understanding. People do. And that’s what we’ve been about for the last 20 years—listening to customers and working with businesses to help them be more productive. If we can get you home even ten minutes earlier with a smile on your face, then we’ve done our job.
Our intention with the new look is to help people see and feel the way our team does everyday—that productivity software can be more personable. It can be warm and it absolutely does have a heartbeat. People have always been at the centre of everything we do. This is the essence of our rebrand.
Let us know what you think by tweeting us at @functionpoint.
Chris Wilson
Founder & CEO
Chris started Function Point over 20 years ago in his basement as a way to help professional service agencies run their businesses more efficiently. Since then he’s grown FP into an international success, working with over 600 agencies from around the world and continues to run the company from the head office in Vancouver, Canada.
