Everphone
Device-as-a-Service brand identity for a Berlin company that had raised $200 million and still looked unbranded
A design system built from buttons, grilles and notches
Industry
Tech
Services
Brand Positioning, Brand Identity
Completed at
Eleven Miles (now GAIN)
Somebody's work phone dies on a Tuesday. In most companies that starts a small chain of misery: a ticket, a loaner nobody has set up, an afternoon of somebody's week gone to a handset. Everphone exists so that none of that happens. It rents phones, tablets and laptops to businesses and runs the whole fleet on one Device-as-a-Service contract, from procurement through to recycling, which by the company's own reckoning gives an IT team back two hours per device.
None of that showed in the brand. The logo had been bought off a marketplace site, with no type system and no colour behind it. A company whose whole job is taking a tedious problem off somebody's hands looked like it had never thought about any of this.
By the end of 2021 the company had raised $200 million and was expanding into the US. The brand hadn't moved with it, and the next conversation was going to be with investors. The obvious fix is to look more like the category, which in enterprise technology means the whites and greys that signal somebody serious. But that's what the rest of the category already looked like.
What the category had agreed on
So the colours went first. White and grey were ruled out before anyone drew anything, which left the rebrand holding on to the name and nothing else. B2B brand identity leans to those colours because they convey authority, and brighter palettes mostly turn up in cybersecurity and litigation, where looking aggressive is the point. Everphone didn't need either. It sells a service people use every day and ring up when a screen cracks.
Looking like everyone else would have answered the investor question in the shallowest possible way. A familiar palette suggests competence right up until somebody puts two websites side by side. And the thing worth selling here is that Everphone is easy to deal with, and managed the process from procurement through to recycling, which is exactly what the category's conventions were hiding.
Competitor identities were analysed and set against each route, and they kept resolving into the same legible, interchangeable look. Three routes went designed, scaled from safe to unexpected: Millennial, on soft colour and rounded type; Dopamine, on neons and gradients; and Brutalist, on hard structure, negative space and shapes taken off the devices. Everphone picked Brutalist.
The rounded rectangle came first
The shapes came off the hardware. Buttons, keys, notches, grilles and camera housings, cropped and blown up to create structure. That gave the identity a vocabulary out of the product rather than applied to it, and it had to be, because the same system had to hold up inside an enterprise procurement document and on a box landing on somebody's desk. Structure carries the first, with warmth carrying the second. The category had only ever built for one.
PP Formula leads the typographic set, in bold and no other weight. Titillium Web supports it for body copy. Teal forms the basis of the brand palette of 12 colours across three tiers, chosen to get at sustainability without the typical eco green, and a pastel tier beneath the primaries that brings warmth.
The Everphone logo took the longest. It started as a clean logotype and went through three revisions before the shape library settled it. Dropping it inside the first device shape, a rounded rectangle, turned the wordmark into something the brand could build with. It slots into structures and layouts created by the hardware shapes.
The brand guidelines run to 95 pages, covering photography, video, iconography, data and chart styling, layout and tone of voice. The shape library gets reviewed every year, so it keeps up with whatever current hardware looks like.
A brand built to grow
Launched in 2022, the Everphone rebrand has defined them as a disruptor in the category. Since launching, Everphone has grown and expanded, and in January 2024 Everphone raised €270 million in a Series D led by Citigroup, KfW and Phoenix Insurance.
More work
Overtone
