The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
fraenk is Deutsche Telekom’s app-only mobile tariff: one flat plan, run through an app, launched in 2020 as a discounted experiment. Five years on, it had quietly become a fixture – genuinely loved by the people who used it, yet still unknown to just about everyone else. Barely 2 in 10 people had heard of it. Looking to close that gap, fraenk turned to Hamburg-based Make Studio, with a brief to evolve the brand rather than reinvent it – refining what already worked to give the product the visibility and character it lacked.
Discount mobile brands tend to compete on price alone, and their marketing usually shows it, with all the cheapest-gigabyte claims and loud, look-at-me graphics. fraenk had long been the exception thanks to a founding principle called ‘radically unspectacular.’ But that principle had reached its limit. Strip a brand back far enough and the plainness that once looked considered starts to feel cold. Make Studio reframed it as ‘spectacularly simple,’ and, working from fraenk’s existing story, distilled a set of guiding brand principles, memorable enough to repeat but firm enough to steer design, tone and behaviour. “When everyone in the discount segment sounds the same, the brand with character wins,” notes Creative Director Hannes Drensler.
“Being radically simple and app-first has always been fraenk’s strength. But it wasn’t enough on its own and no longer future proof as competitors began to catch up,” explains Art Director Paul Eslage. “In the meantime, a different quality had started to define fraenk: their strong sense of community.” The ‘fraenk for friends’ offer had helped that community grow, and the relaunch set out to build on it. “Our main goal was to encourage word-of-mouth recommendations based on people’s connection to the brand, not on price,” Drensler continues. “We want people to love fraenk.”
“The logo isn’t the hero anymore. Type is,” Eslage tells us. Simplicity, as Make Studio saw it, meant pure rather than bare. The wordmark has been refined to sharpen recognition, and at its centre, the studio strengthened the ‘æ’ ligature that fraenk had used for years but rarely let stand alone. Redrawn, it now stands for the sense of community the reframe had leaned on. “Picture the ‘æ’ as two letters giving each other a warm hug,” Eslage explains. “That’s the feeling we wanted to evoke, through the curved crossbar and the overall friendliness of the forms.”
To extend that character across the brand, Make wanted a bespoke headline typeface, starting from Displaay’s easy-going sans serif, Greed. “It already does the work of simplicity,” Eslage notes, keeping it as the base and adding “spectacular” details of their own – such as swashed upstrokes and curved strokes taken from the wordmark. “They are there to bring moments of joy into an otherwise fairly simple design,” he adds.
With the type doing the identifying, the layout has less to do. “Because the wordmark and the customised font are drawn from the same forms, the identity now speaks through the type itself,” Eslage details, which lets the studio set a large message on a billboard and drop whatever the page doesn’t need around it. The palette works the same way. fraenk yellow, once restricted to a text-highlighter role, now covers full surfaces. ‘Fully yellow backgrounds draw more attention in out-of-home or social ads,” Drensler notes – while the app and website stick to white and warm greys, turning to yellow in smaller zones to flag a topic. Blue and green accents mark out special sections and offers, keeping the system from settling into “same-same.”
Where the old brand relied on cryptic geometric icons, Make Studio developed a world of illustrative doodles, drawn by illustrator Ronja Overländer, that turn technical topics into playful characters, such as a flying SIM card standing in for how activating an eSIM feels, or a figure surfing across a phone towards its next data allowance. “We wanted to make technical topics feel fun and interesting,” Drensler explains. “The most important rule: it has to be fun.” Organic outlines picked out with yellow tie the illustrations together across every subject. The verbal identity grew out of the type itself – the optimistic, carefree feel of the letterforms setting the tone for a voice that is playful, personal and quietly funny.
The relaunch has given fraenk more warmth and confidence without blunting the clarity that had always set it apart, making a low-interest product into a brand people feel something for. Brand perception rose by more than 30% among 18-to-50-year-olds who know fraenk, and willingness to recommend more than doubled. “Recommendation is at the heart of how fraenk grows,” Senior Brand Manager Rike Baumbach concludes – the relaunch turning customers into “enthusiastic multipliers” who put their name behind the brand rather than its price.