From the Inside Out

Established in 2002 and previously named Add Media Group, Thrive Media Group is a digital marketing company based in Altrincham, a town near Manchester, UK. With 130 employees, Thrive Media Group helps over 4,000 clients to “accelerate business growth online” with a combination of services offered through four individual brands within the group. From SEO optimization, to search ads, to paid social content, to geo-targeted marketing, the company works mostly with SMEs (small to medium enterprises). With the recent name change, Thrive Media Group introduced a new identity designed by Manchester-based Ahoy.

The digital marketing landscape is crowded with brands that have little differentiation in offering or identity, on the surface it can appear dry and technical. To stand out we took a more emotive approach. Our focus was representing Thrive’s passion for their work and the results it can generate through optimism and progression.

We created a logo comprised of four corners that point out into all frontiers. It becomes a wider identity device through motion. The word Thrive is organic in nature. This theme flows through the identity into imagery that imbues the logo.

Ahoy project page

If the old logo looks like nothing but text on a website that’s because it was. There was no official logo so what I put in the “before” box barely qualifies as a logo but, still, it’s good to show where the company is coming from. The new logo features a very commanding icon with some sharp angles and corners through a set of triangles arranged in a kaleidoscopic-like composition. Following the triangles from the center out, the icon has a nice, subtle implication of growth and expansion. It also has a slight evil-corporation-from-a-movie vibe, perhaps mostly because of the size relationship with the wordmark, yielding a large overpowering icon — which we’ll get back to below. The wordmark is typeset in Cooper Hewitt, the open source font designed by Chester Jenkins commissioned by Pentagram for the Cooper-Hewitt, which I often try to use but almost always think “This looks like the Cooper Hewitt”. In this logo (and identity), though, they were able to make it less Cooper Hewitt-y and it works well with the icon.

Five key themes (Growth, Discovery, Reassurance, Energy and Vision) underpin the identity, speaking to different audiences at different stages of the purchase pipeline. The straplines developed along side the tone of voice correlate directly with the imagery they support.

Ahoy project page

The icon is then infused with some moody imagery and the kaleidoscope effect is turned up to, if not 11, a solid 8, creating some great compositions that blend very nicely against the all-black backgrounds, which is another thing I love about this identity, that it avoids the typical happy colors.

Not a whole lot of applications but the two above — business cards and covers — are so good, literally bursting with energy while also looking very business-oriented. Overall, this has a great mix of emotion through the imagery and logic through the geometric icon and pared down typography that makes Thrive Media Group look much more interesting and layered than other digital marketing businesses.