Verve rebrands Lebara, a mobile operator used by millions across Europe — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Lebara is a mobile virtual network operator – meaning it sells mobile service on another operator’s infrastructure – and has millions of customers across Europe. “What made it the right moment, I think, was that even internally there was a clear feeling the existing branding had gone stale, it wasn’t keeping pace with modern trends, and it didn’t reflect how dynamic Lebara actually is,” explains Global Design & UX Lead Angelina Severino. Outside the company, research carried out for Lebara’s Netherlands team showed a clear opportunity: while the business and the proposition had evolved, the identity had not fully kept pace, leaving a growing gap between the quality of the service Lebara offered and how the brand presented itself. The Hague-based strategic branding agency Verve was commissioned to redesign the identity and accompanying deliverables.

“We asked Verve to align Lebara’s brand expression with what the company actually is: dynamic, modern and genuinely obsessed with its customers,” Severino notes. “What came back was a full brand design system that reflected exactly those qualities, and then went further. They took our motto, ‘A Smarter Choice,’ and evolved it into ‘Join a smarter perspective on mobile,’ something more philosophical, bigger than just a good deal.”

“The telco category defaults to the same playbook. Clean sans serifs. Stock photography of people holding phones. A vague promise of connection. The visual language of reliability,” explains Verve’s Brand Strategist Patrick Boyle. “But Lebara’s product was already reliable when we first started working together. That wasn’t the problem to solve. The problem was perception,” Boyle continues. “It was all a matter of perspective. We wanted the new Lebara brand to feel bold and confident, to project the trustworthiness that the existing users felt, whilst making sure we kept its slightly gritty and opinionated charm. So we threw out all the telco conventions and started fresh.” From there, Verve built the strategic platform around the customers Lebara already had. “When you’re a Lebara user, you see things differently: you have a Smart Perspective on mobile,” Boyle adds. “That idea drove every creative decision. Lebara’s new distinctive brand assets are its warped typography, the parallax collages and the deliberate wobbliness in the UI.”

“The main idea behind the creative is seeing things differently and getting a better experience because of it,” Verve’s Senior Designer Walewijn den Boer tells us. “We wanted to push that idea to the extreme and imagined the whole identity as if viewed through a handheld mobile device. This results in slight camera jitter in motion and, ideally, compositions that are never quite fully straight. To emphasise the idea of perspective even more, the hero images are made up of 2D elements put on a 3D plane: spatial collages that reveal their depth when viewed in motion. To achieve the desired effect, we applied a combination of vector transformations for the type and traditional crafted collages combined with a custom 3D composition tool that let us apply an extreme fisheye lens effect, something that traditional 3D tools did not allow for.”

The typography that gets warped is Lebara Sans, a bespoke typeface that Verve developed with Blast Foundry. “Making a custom title font was part of the conversation from day one, primarily because of the creative ambitions of both the Lebara and Verve teams,” den Boer continues. “Also considering the various licensing costs involved, it just makes more financial sense for brands with a certain reach and channel mix to develop a custom typographic solution. We knew some deliverables would rely almost exclusively on typography, so we created a custom font that both carries information and conveys brand personality.”

“The basic construction of the capital letters is an evolution from the previous logo, thus building on existing brand equity,” den Boer details. “The lowercase characters were designed by Blast Foundry to complement their Vanilla Sans font, which is used for body copy in the identity. This ensures a pleasing relationship between titles and running text. Extra attention was given to numerals and currency symbols to make pricing and deals look extra attractive and clear. In the visual system, the typography intentionally gets subjected to various ‘typographic crimes’ like skewing and distorting. Extensive tests were done to ensure legibility of the font even when pushed to extremes.”

The type and the collages use two colours, Smart Blue and Think Pink. “Lebara was a blue brand before, so we decided to build on that rather than go for something completely different,” Boyle notes. “With all the distorted type and spatial collages in the mix, it also helps to balance the identity out and leverage emotional triggers like trustworthiness. The Smart Blue is configured to add more boldness and more of a digital edge to the brand. It is the main brand colour and the first thing one should visually associate with the brand. Because of the emphasis on blue in layouts, we needed a call-to-action colour that would grab the attention and contrast well with the blue; we found that colour in Think Pink. So the decision tree would be: Building brand equity? Use Smart Blue. Direct the attention at something? Use Think Pink.”

Across campaigns and assets, Verve set three volume levels, Low, Medium and High, that control how loud each piece feels. “They’re not tied to age or audience segment, but rather on how bold the brand should behave,” den Boer explains. “In Low volume, there are no skewed elements, and the focus is mostly on typography. For example, when running a campaign where we want to be more factual or in instances where we want to communicate a lot of information in a clear way. The Medium and High levels feel more playful and expressive; this is where the skewed typography and perspective collages get unlocked, respectively. These are more suitable for storytelling, brand building and having a bolder visual footprint. The application of the levels is not an exact science, rather a scale to consider when designing campaigns and assets.”

The identity is live in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany, with France to follow, and Lebara reports that the Netherlands launch has performed well. It is also licensed to partners in Nigeria, Denmark, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Spain. “A system that has to travel that far can’t rely on anyone following it perfectly. So we built range into the identity itself,” Boyle concludes.