Project Overview
ARK Investment Management is a financial startup that aims to invest in promising areas of disruptive innovation and looks at companies that are changing and improving the way the world works. We do this through combining traditional active asset management with technologically enabled tools.
We wanted to create a logo that encompassed our values, combining traditional investing with modern concepts. We also wanted to create a logo that differentiated itself from the “typical” financial firm. Though people see many different things in our logo, our goal was to create a brand that portrayed the tension of the traditional and the modern. Through its traditional straight lines on one side and an asymmetrical creative force on the other, this brand design captured the essence of ARK.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Chief Marketing Officer: Emily Vogelzang
Art Director: Faith McCormick
Project Brief
ARK Investment Management is dedicated to combining classical investing with cutting edge technology tools so we can invest at the speed of human creativity and innovation. It was founded to offer investment opportunities to allocate capital to its highest and best use, with a focus on disruptive innovation.
The goal was to create a brand, color scheme, website, and business collateral that conveyed those values. We wanted to maintain a sense of tradition and credibility but infuse a modern and fresh view on what investment could look like in the era of open-source technology, social media and a 24-hour news cycle.
Like our investment philosophy, we wanted to incorporate the energy and vitality of disruptive technology into traditional financial marketing with a structured and artistic logo. These two concepts allowed us to bring together a brand mark that created a level of sophistication and movement but was grounded in tradition.
Project Innovation/Need
The aspiration for this project was to bring a breath of fresh air into finance brand creation through intentional design. Most financial service firms tend to engage power logos through dark fonts and heavy typography. Unlike those firms, we believed we could create a logo for ARK that would portray strength through sophisticated fonts and elegant lines, all while bringing the modern and the traditional together. We believe our brand achieved this balance.
Design Challenge
The main challenge and inspiration for the logo was to create a sophisticated mark which portrays the convergence of multiple concepts as a unified whole. The graphic treatment of the word ARK contained within the circle achieves this balance with strength and elegance. The bottom half utilizes a traditional pie-chart motif while the top half of circle conveys the dynamic and sometimes chaotic energy of the market.
ARK wanted to differentiate itself from its competitors with logo that conveyed smart sophistication with disruptive energy. One of ARK's goals is to bring back the art of traditional investing through iterative and collaborative processes. Our challenge was to do the same with our logo.
Effectiveness
The response we have received from both men and women, young and mature, finance professionals and those not in the industry has been extremely positive. Many automatically see the words ARK within the logo. The most intriguing, and we feel the most effective aspect of the logo is that people see different things within it. We believe this versatility is one of the things that differentiates the ARK brand from its peers. We are incredibly pleased and believe that the ARK brand is a symbol of a financial company that deeply cares not only about investing but also about sophisticated design.
Graphic Design - Identity and Branding
This award celebrates creative and innovative design in the traditional or digital visual representation of ideas and messages. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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