Making broadband feel good
A brand to help a startup fly
Cuckoo are on a mission to change broadband for good. Faster. Fairer. With a positive impact on the world. Together, we created a brand to live up to the startup’s big ambitions, positioning Cuckoo as a broadband provider you can actually feel good about.
Visit the site“We’re taking on a stodgy and slow-moving sector. Building a brand that can go toe-to-toe with the big incumbents and surpass them as a true, industry-defining business is what we’re about. Brand matters.”
Alex Fitzgerald
Co-Founder & CEO, Cuckoo
In a category bogged down by the table stakes of speed and performance, Cuckoo’s difference is the experience they give customers. Meaningful benefits include flexible contracts, top-rated customer service and one per cent of every bill going towards internet access where it’s needed most. We rallied around the idea that Cuckoo is broadband that starts good, stays good and does good — so why shouldn’t it feel good?
The first iteration of the Cuckoo brand had a great idea for a symbol in place, it just wasn’t working hard enough yet. We refined the symbol, and redrew the wordmark to add more Cuckoo character alongside it, taking the core identity to a new level and capturing the spirit and ambition of the brand.
Like their broadband-providing namesake, cuckoos are trailblazing creatures. They lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, with colour and patterns morphing to match the new host, who raises the chick as one of its own. Inspired by this shape-shifting cheek, we designed a series of ‘egg worlds’, which evolve to communicate Cuckoo’s benefits, like flexibility, connectivity and support. These adaptive environments bring the customer experience to life.
From the shapely characters of new brand typeface Garnett, to softly rounded components and iconography, egg-inspired forms celebrate Cuckoo’s spirit through every part of the design language. This creates a cohesion between big, expressive moments and more functional, hard-working elements. Eggs make their most literal appearance in ‘Cuckoo Guides’, where they form the basis of topical illustrations.
To quote Tommy Toner, Cuckoo’s VP of Product, “Brand and UX are two sides of the same coin.” We worked closely with their product team, showing fresh ways to inject character into every page and component while making the digital experience as simple as possible.
Surfacing the ‘Cuckoo compass’ throughout the site boosts the company’s profile as a responsible business and employer. And we devised a ‘Switch to Cuckoo’ page, to address the emotional concerns people might have about moving. Alongside key pages for sign-up, login, account and emails, all of this exploration formed the basis of Cuckoo’s new open source design system, ‘Yolk’, built by their in-house team from the pages and components we delivered.
To position Cuckoo alongside global tech leaders, motion design plays a key role in the new design language. We established high-level motion principles across the brand and digital experience, from micro-interactions and functional builds, to rewarding signature moments full of Cuckoo spirit. Each principle is designed to help the experience, while making the brand more memorable and creating greater ownership of the egg. The principles were delivered through live examples and prototypes using Lottie, an open source animation file format.
We always talk about the power of true collaboration and this project shows why. Cuckoo’s leadership team bought into our process, with multiple disciplines contributing and reviewing at every stage. In-house design time was dedicated to testing, adapting and breaking the components, to ensure they were fit for purpose. The result is a robust and cohesive brand and digital design system that Cuckoo genuinely own, inspiring them on their mission to lead the UK’s broadband industry.
“We put a lot of trust in the process and it paid off. The evolved brand and design system has given us the tools and foundations to set us up for scale — positioning us as a distinctive player in the global telecoms space. We feel so excited to show the world what Cuckoo Broadband really is.”
Tommy Toner
Co-Founder & VP of Product, Cuckoo
