As startup culture impacts the industrial landscape, today’s top talents are breaking with convention and finding inspiration and creative freedom in the most unexpected of places — luxury real estate.

Convention: kənˈven(t)SH(ə)n | noun | an established technique, practice, or device

Creativity has always been a driving force in the workplace, but it could be argued that today’s startup culture is unlocking its full potential.

For decades, a rigid structure has existed. Creatives worked within the confines of their designated field, and the exposure to their company’s bigger picture was controlled and fleeting. And among the “non-creative” fields — finance, healthcare, automotive, insurance, and real estate — these visual and verbal communicators circulated in and out, delivering in prescriptive bursts.

As the world acclimates to more fluid career paths, more collaborative workflow, and more technology-driven efficiencies, we now have ample opportunity to not only churn out new products, but to conceptualize how design and content inform that process. At this frontier is a new breed of company perfectly positioned to adopt — and primed to support — this wave of creative output. These innovators weave thoughtfully crafted words and images into their corporate fabric, foster relationships across departments, and allow creatives infinite options to stretch professionally and test the bounds of what’s possible.

While great talents still work in the advertising agencies, design firms, publishing houses, and film studios of the world, those most eager to challenge creative constraints are increasingly finding a place within this entrepreneurial ecosystem, in environments where they can sate their deeper thirst for impactful creation.

This was my vision for joining Compass from day one — to build a marketing group with top in-house creative and production capabilities at its core and to construct a home for boundary-pushing makers from a variety of backgrounds.

Looking back at 2015, we have come a long way toward realizing this goal of a world-class studio. Our design and marketing team members hail from a cross-section of industries — film, publishing, advertising, architecture, photography, music, beauty, and their own design shops. And yet, they’ve found their way to a technology-based real estate startup. Why?

Startups are inherently creative environments.

From Betterment to Oscar to Uber, new ventures arise from the belief that ‘new’ can, in fact, be better. These pioneers are entrepreneurial and confident, yes, but they’re also iterative and open-minded. Their industries weren’t traditionally attractive to great creative talent, but each of these companies has built their business atop beautiful design work, dynamic communications, original content, and internal teams from a cross-section of industries, viewing its people and their Big Ideas as an essential competitive advantage.

Similarly, at Compass, when the marketing team pitches a brand magazine or a video series to the company’s executives or agents, they aren’t just receptive; they’re enthusiastic.

We’re already in the business of pioneering new ideas, so experimenting with different mediums and messaging is entirely aligned with our company’s DNA.

Real estate was never an industry known to champion this thinking, but when designers, producers, strategists, and editors join our team, they align not with the industry’s vision, but with their chance to make their mark upon it.

Technology is fundamentally a design form.

Engineers and product developers may be among the most widely discounted creative population working today. While their preferred medium consists of code, whiteboard, and wireframes, the process of developing a digital tool is akin to laying out an ad, penning an article, or shooting video footage — from ideation to going live, from crafting a user experience to deftly incorporating their feedback, every step is iterative and design-intensive.

The only difference is that theirs is an existential creativity, whereas the field has traditionally revolved around more tangible, aesthetic concepts. The truest evidence of this field’s imaginative aptitude? Because each decision is made in pursuit of innovation or improvement, it is virtually impossible for a successful technology company to ferment or stagnate.

The best need new challenges.

Approaching an unorthodox field as a creative contributor inherently allows for greater impact. Not only are you able to influence your firm, but often you have the unique ability to shape the interface of an entire industry.

Rather than respond to pre-existing tenets, you’re able to reinvent image, experience, and process as you go.

You’ve heard the stories before: the designer who toils in an ad agency working on a single account for years or cranking out identical banner ads for different clients. On a lean, innovative team, no contributor is less than pivotal. I have found the best modern design talent to be skilled across multiple mediums — layout, typography, animation, photography, art direction, illustration — and because of this unique aptitude, they are even more allergic to limitation.

Our department concepts, styles, and directs shoots, animates films, produces a magazine, creates advertisements, composes soundtracks, designs brand collateral, develops original social media content, and produces it all from concept to distribution — a diversity of exposure that certainly no other real estate marketing team can claim, and few roles in the creative industry afford. And not only do we perform these functions; we’re constantly innovating better methodology, from social media image generators to signage template systems.

And what about those who spend 80% of their time on internal output, like writing Keynote pitch decks or designing a video just to convince a client to let them do the work? By eliminating these steps, the effort is concentrated on better solutions — solutions our agents and their clients can actually experience. The in-house environment we foster attracts the talent necessary and frees them to strive for a constantly improving ratio of high quality, faster speed, and lower cost.

Ultimately, the term ‘creative’ can be misleading. Ideas aren’t insurable and even the most dynamic environments can become stale — especially when accepted practices become routine and stimulation is lacking. But startup environments will always be creative, because every process is an experiment, and the potential of each idea is limitless. As we bend the rules and adapt its principles, we recognize that creativity does not exist in a vacuum; it has a place within even the most improbable of environments — and may indeed thrive more for it.

If you’re looking to join a collaborative team and impact an entire industry — say hi.

Head of Design and Marketing Matt Spangler joined Compass in 2014 after three years of building an in-house creative studio at Tribeca Enterprises, where he oversaw the Tribeca Film Festival branding, responsive sites, new ticketing platforms, documentary films and TV series fully funded by brands, YouTube channels, national advertising campaigns, and digital product development for the Tribeca Shortlist SVOD platform.

The End of Creative Convention was originally published in Compass Quarterly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It was late October 2014, and I was meeting with the accomplished young COO of a tech startup named Urban Compass. Their impressive co-founders, Ori Allon and Robert Reffkin, had built a great team in many areas of the company and had raised three rounds of funding. They were on a mission for change in the real estate industry and searching for someone to lead their creative and marketing efforts. My background was uncommon for the industry but Ori believes, that bringing people from the outside provides a unique perspective into the daunting challenge of reinventing real estate. I started a month later.

One of the early goals was to build a top-notch in-house design team. It is no mystery that in the last few years design has become an increasingly popular differentiator, especially in the technology sector. It helps that the world’s most successful tech companies (Apple, Airbnb, Uber) have put it at the forefront of their culture. VC’s are snapping up designers, and everyone has spent the last couple years writing an article about “Why Design Matters”. Our focus around cross-functional product and communication design was critical to the future of the business. In order to provide design and marketing services that exceed agents expectations and build products focused on adding value to their day-to-day, it was important to align the design teams while still giving autonomy to each.

Design is vital for our success, and we need to attract the best creative talent. From Google to MoMA to Randy Hunt’s team at Etsy, the models for a robust internal design studio exist. It was our challenge to deliver a special sauce of agent support, product design, and the creation of a global brand. We had the core of a design group and the agent, engineering and strategy talent in spades. Through a combination of smart acquisitions and networking, we were on our way, but we needed to go further with our brand and culture to become a place that inspires creative talent.

“Let’s change the name”

The desire to find a home is a universal human experience but at the top end of the market real estate is an industry of aspirations. As Giorgio Armani said, “I don’t collect art, I collect houses”. The same goes for the most successful agents. The reality is that ten percent of the agents in the industry account for around ninety percent of the total transaction volume*. We need to be a brand that inspires the industry’s best agents.

We felt the industry had yet to define a premium consumer brokerage brand that spoke to a modern high-end home buyer. I felt a simplified name could speak to our mission and be a memorable representation of our brand. I strongly recommended to the executive team we shorten the name and go after the URL, compass.com. It turned out Ori had had been talking to the owner but had not yet pulled the trigger. The opportunity seemed great.

Changing a company name after a year in business was a daunting challenge. One of the problems is that 99% of the time there is little chance to own the digital footprint of the new name. Surprisingly most of the major social media accounts were vacant or unused. We felt the big challenges, including SEO concerns around the wide-spread use of “compass,” were not outweighed by the opportunity to own the mindshare. We went into action.

Was it the right call?

• It was simple, memorable, and iconic — incredibly important in a highly competitive real estate industry.
• It was not a totally new name, it just eliminated a modifier, which had been done successfully by other companies (Ex. Apple Computers).
• We were still largely unknown and hadn’t built up an insurmountable amount of brand equity for the original name.
• It removed the reference to cities which would be a limitation as we expanded beyond urban areas.
• We secured the digital footprint including compass.com, Instagram, and Facebook.
• There was no company that clearly defined the name globally.
• It had a clear connection to the guidance that great people combined with simple technology provide.

Walking the B2C / B2B Tightrope

With our digital home secured, we now needed a new visual identity that lived up to the name. It was December 2014, and we planned to open our first office outside of Manhattan in early February 2015. It made sense to launch in Washington DC with the new brand, but we didn’t have enough time to create the complete visual identity and learn lessons from the new market on what our brand really needed for growth. We made a tough choice to drop the “Urban” with the DC opening, build the internal design team, learn from expansion, and work on the identity system in parallel for an evolution early summer.

Creating a brand isn’t just a new logo. By definition, it’s the sum total of the company’s actions and how that affects people’s perception. This recent Percolate article is a good place to start for a better sense of the complexity. In our case, going through a rebrand affected every aspect of the company including our product, communications, marketing materials and even the office design, all custom built for who we are today while leaving room for where we want to go.

One of our biggest challenges as a company, and with this project, is that we have to consider both B2C as well as B2B. A unique brand architecture that’s not a branded house and not a franchise model. We need to have a strong consumer brand at the center, as well as a system ready for the B2B needs that come from developing entrepreneurial tools for our agents, who’s individual branding and marketing goals vary by market and preference. Agility, intelligence and simplicity were key to solving one of life’s most complex decisions — buying and selling a home.

Laying the Foundation

We did an audit of all design at the the company. Fonts, colors, icons, even button styles on the website, app, emails and even marketing collateral were all completely different.

To juggle near and long-term priorities, the talented team at Ro&Co kick-started the identity process while we were building the in-house design studio. Their logo exploration got us closer to a design direction and was the starting point of eliciting feedback — and excitement — from agents and company leaders.

By mid-January we had brought on more senior design talent and added production, editorial, and strategy experts from places like Pixar, Condé Nast, Warner Bros. Twitter, and Droga5. The internal design team polished the final logo, adding mathematical rigor to the angles, line weight, kerning, and circular relationships.

“I love things with balance and symmetry.” — Ori Allon

These words were spoken by our co-founder during one of our many feedback sessions and provided a True North throughout the process. With such an iconic name it would be rare that the logo-mark would ever be used on its own. By integrating the logo-mark inside the final logo-type, we achieved a combination of balance and symmetry while still having the option for a bold symbol. It needed to look elegant sitting centered in the middle of a white page or over a gorgeous interior photograph. A subtle confidence that represents the feeling Compass agents give their clients.

An animation collaboration between Paul Vlachou and Vince Joy showed the new brand coming to life, resulting in an emphatic, “Let’s do this!” from the co-founders and president.

From there, the hard work began of creating the entire brand ecosystem. Over the next two months the team created a completely new framework that would solve our existing challenges and live up to our future ambitions. Everything was on the table, but we were confident that our world-class team could deliver impactful work within a tight timeline.

Playing against type

One of the biggest hurdles we faced was a very limiting font family. We had previously used Proxima Nova as the single font for the brand. With the huge number of use cases, we needed a system that could resonate across print, digital product design, agent marketing and beyond. Having worked at the company longer than most, Vince knew that the listing hierarchy was a great place to start. He used map references to inspire the line art framework that could house the key information for the listing. Whether inside the product or an advertisement, the information travels with it, adjusting to the size and space required.

One of our key insights was that we needed a font family that complimented each other and communicated the various aspects of the brand. We chose Tiempos to communicate refined luxury, Harmonia for modern approachability and Pressura Mono for data and technology. They all worked together to form the listings framework.

Distilled and dynamic

Sitting alone the mark is abstract and conjures up many different references (compass, keyhole, i/o button, road sign) but sitting within the name, it is clearly the most distilled form of a compass — a circle and needle.

As we sought flexibility in our system we also wanted additional symbols, each one equally memorable and connected to the mythology of the compass — way-finding, cartography, data visualization and maps. These formed the basis for our pattern exploration throughout the color story process and icons we could use in different mediums.

#000000 + #ffffff

The word luxury is used to describe our brand mostly because the properties marketed by our top agents are very high end. Luxury means so many different things to so many people. We needed to define it in our own way — sophistication that was grounded in intelligence, agility, and simplicity. So we first looked at influences outside our industry memes — the images surrounding fashion, art, auto, architecture, film — for a uniquely sophisticated story.

We then did two full weeks of color research, looking inside the industry to see where the majority of the colors landed. Many lean on one color, but we didn’t want to be the “purple” or “green” brand. Plus, in an industry where great photography was the hero, we already had a rich palette for the vast majority of use cases. By giving ourselves the rigor of only working with black and white, the restriction pushed us to create a more complex, nuanced brand that would work great with photography and allow us to bring any color into the story later. Great brands like Apple and Nike are not known by one color, but their ability to use any.

“We decided as a team that every aspect of our branding should be
dynamic and responsive. Black and white as our backdrop allows us to play out any combination of color stories on the stage, while letting photography dominate when it’s the main character” — Jeff Lai

Connecting the dots

So instead of color, we decided to riff on the shapes (dots, needle) within the compass to add textures, character, and a subtle nod to way-finding, nautical motifs and our data-driven approach. We felt it was an ownable, dimensional part of our toolkit.

We applied it to collateral and put that in the hands of our agents. It was important to arm them with tools that were useful and beautiful since they are our best ambassadors helping to tell our brand story, everyday, on the streets.

Unlocking the code

In order for us to successfully release the new identity into the world, we had to, of course, update the look of our consumer product. The majority of our clients come to our website or iPhone app searching for a home and looking to communicate quickly and easily with our agents.

Our product and engineering team builds vital tools based on business needs and constant iteration, while our data team makes sure that we have the best possible listings availability. Together, this leads to the best possible consumer experience.

For such a complex stack of technology, the two-month timeframe was herculean task, and the team showed the power of commitment and collaboration by delivering on time. Neves Rodrigues and Paul Vlachou lead the site design, applying learnings from agents over the past year, and a core A-team of engineers (see below) rebuilt the site with a homepage that supports our future expansion and a listings view with many new features, including an improved open house feature — evidence that agent-driven innovation guides our product pipeline.

The consumer app was completely revamped as well, led by new Product Design Lead Yaron Schoen and built by our tenacious mobile engineering team. They built upon a great framework by Savannah Wolf and brought the new brand to life for all our iPhone customers, from subtly animated patterns to a cohesive listing framework.

“The timeline was tight, so we leaned on native conventions to simplify our process and make the app more intuitive for our users.” — Yaron Schoen

An icon set developed at scale with our logo was also used extensively for the app’s search filters, helping further our new style’s consistency. The push for an early summer release means everyone walking in the warm weather and dreaming of a new home can depend on the new Compass.

T.C.B.

The DC expansion and three-month design process gave us time to learn from our agents about the pieces they needed to be successful. Direct marketing, both print and digital, is a vital part of the agent arsenal for supporting their sellers and reaching the right buyer. In an industry where the big players lean on huge advertising campaigns while providing little value to the individual agents, and photographs of gorgeous homes are reduced to thumbnails to fit the most on a page, we wanted to invest in tools for our agents and a brand that was flexible and sophisticated.

We audited the most popular templates from the first six months of the year and created multiple design options for each. A modular system was developed that allows agents to choose from a wide variety of options that still adhere to the brand aesthetics. The launch includes hundreds of new templates, from postcards and show sheets to email templates and social assets.

To present the options we created a digital and print catalog so agents can create marketing materials with more speed and agility. According to our research, this offering is unlike anything in the industry and aligns with the company’s focus of building tools to allow agents to spend more time supporting their clients.

The catalog is a part of an on-boarding kit that includes key materials that new agents need on day one to support their business. In the hyper-competitive world of agent recruiting, this allows successful agents to hit the ground running when they transition their careers from other brokerages to Compass.

Having a great new brand is meaningless if no one sees it. From print and digital to video and social, our advertising campaign will take shape over the rest of the year. To serve our growing list of exclusive properties, Irina Anisimova developed a new editorial style for our listing ads that could accommodate a collection of properties while remaining refined and uncluttered.

We kick things off in July with spreads in some of the world’s best lifestyle publications. They were identified by agents as important to their target audiences but without being saturated by our competition.

Branding in balance

All agents are entrepreneurs — a vital point for the design team to remember. The Compass culture makes them feel like co-workers, but they are independent contractors, so we wanted to find a way to support their personal branding. This construct is unique to our industry, so it demanded new thinking. Since agents are identified by their names, and legally there are requirements around team branding, we needed a system that would conform to these rules and be scalable as we expanded our agent base.

Our solution was a system of monograms — classic in concept, elegant in execution and unique to individual styles. Starting with the initials and a personal assessment to determine what traits each agent or team wanted, the agent brand marketing leads this process so that we assure that delicate balance between the two.

Lastly, we created a system of social assets so our agent-ambassadors could spread the word to their extensive networks, whether through Instagram animations that introduce the new logo or videos showcasing DC neighborhoods.

Reflection

The reasons above break it down, but if I had to give a one-sentence answer to why we did it, I’d say, “after working with all the incredible people at Compass, it was clear we needed a brand design that embodied our company values: intelligence, simplicity, agility, and sophistication”.

It’s imperative we live up to that idea everywhere we can. Are we there yet? Not quite, but it’s been an incredible ride so far, and the journey is just beginning.

Thanks

There are so many people to thank who worked tirelessly the last four months to bring our brand to life, but I wanted to show special gratitude to the following:

Irina, Vince, Jeff, Paul, Maddie, Aaron, Buzz, Anna, Victor, Kyra, Kyle, Amy W., Amy P., Jessica, Mike F., Indira, Liz, Cathy, Euney, Shannon, Stephanie, Michael S, Neves, Savannah, Yaron, Alex, Glenn, Shilpi, Khadija, Liming, Alex, Ugo, Rob L., Mike B., Ishika, Wendy, Rory, Jordan, and Ciara.

A special shoutout to the rebrand engineering and mobile aces: Zach, Wylie, Marcus, Bobby, Ian, Luke, James, Jerry, and Jon.

Thanks to our pioneering agents who joined us in this initial growth period and have helped shape every product we’ve launched and marketing piece we’ve art-directed. Lastly, a big thanks to Ori, Robert, David, and Leonard who have supported the process from the start.

We’re still looking for talented designers, engineers and product superstars to join our team. If you are interested, we’d love to hear from you.

footnote *Inman, 5/4/15

True North: The 120-Day Compass Design Journey was originally published in Compass Quarterly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.