Moonpig overhauls its brand using “cheeky humour with heart” (and kills the space pig)

Personalised card and gift retailer Moonpig has unveiled a complete brand overhaul designed by its in-house creative director and creative team, working together with Ian Styles, Simon Smith and Stuart Hammersley with a new typeface by Rick Banks. It is the first refresh since Moonpig.com launched in 2000 and the company has dropped the .com from its name and its cartoon pig mascot.

The new identity and typeface is being rolled out across the Moonpig website, its products and printed promotional materials as well as being used on TV campaigns. The branding takes an unconventional, but playful, concept that plays on the surreal name of the company. “Building on its new positioning our idea was a simple one; create a whole new world for Moonpig, one where we imagine that we live life on the moon, where the normal rules don’t apply,” says Ian Styles. “We seek to capture people in our new world’s gravity, pulling them towards us for a moment, offering an escape, where boring is banished, the obvious avoided and where life, is more fun and lighthearted.”

The new logotype uses a custom type family create by Rick Banks’ F37 Foundry based on its Ginger Type. The new typeface is a Demi weight that has been named Moonpig Lift-Off. “The logotype is playfully designed to compress down to form a subtle reference to a pig’s snout in small spaces and extend out to allow play with horizontal formats and interact with the new TV jingle,” says Ian. “This weight features three styles of alternates with random programming, giving it a playful yet structured execution. It consists of four subclasses: a regular class for the normal design of the characters, one class for the ‘lift’ characters, another class for the ‘wobbly’ characters and one for the more complex group of characters – those that ‘shake’. A method called ‘Quantum’ was used for the programming. This allowed for a higher degree of randomness, which is defined by the amount of characters affected within a certain group of characters and level of substitution.”

The project also extends to a tone of voice for the whole company to use across its communications. “Working with the in-house writing team we have established a new tone of voice that brings a glimpse of life on the moon to our customers at every opportunity,” says Ian. “Carefully sitting between being too safe and too gimmicky, we offer the antidote to boring by challenging the norm, using cheeky humour with heart.”