Mimi Hearing Technologies is a leader and innovator in personalized sound technology, which adjusts the music to an individual's unique hearing profile, and focuses on the health of hearing. 

In 2017, Mimi partnered with the high-end German headphone company, beyerdynamic. Mimi had developed a SOC that allowed it's accurate and widely trialled hearing test (over 1M users tested) to be inserted in a headphone so that the test and personalized hearing profile could be uploaded from a device to headphones via Bluetooth technology. It was quite a game-changer.

I was initially hired to help develop and visually design the partner hearing-test application, also, to eventually lead the visual branding of the technology behind Mimi's sound personalization algorithm. 

The marketing team came up with the name Mimi Defined; Mimi's technology defines the sound precisely for each user. As for the design team, our task was to design the logo and build out the visual side of the brand platform

TL;DR

Objective:

• Design a logo and visually build out the brand platform

Challenges:

• 1w timetable for logo design 

• Develop visual branding and guidelines  

• Design and animate logo bumpers

• Design and support marketing campaign 

Deliverables 

• Logo Design

• Brand Guidelines

• Brand Resource Website microsite for Partners

• Animation

• Marketing Campaigns

Logo Design

The design team had 1w to conceptualize, develop and design the logo, narrowing the field of choices to 5 for a presentation for the Executive staff & Marketing team. The MarCom team's competitive analysis revealed that we needed a logo that could be placed on the packaging and used in trade show booths that could stand out in the crowd; the personalized audio arena was starting to heat up, and Mimi wanted to own the space.

We started with as many as possible — there were four team members, and we all did 100 quick sketches in 1 hour, which left us with 400 designs.

From there, we unapologetically slashed any designs we did not like. We had 42 logos. From there, I digitally re-drew them, and the next day, we went through another round of discussions and deletions to leave us with the final 7. Then the fun began. We cut two and I started to refine the final 5 at a breakneck pace, which added more variants. Then people began crowing around and adding comments (design by committee!). That added more options. 

6d after we started, we settled on a final. On-time and on budget.

Brand Guidelines

The marketing team and I worked on establishing precise guideline usage for the Mimi Define brand based Mimi Define's expanding integration with partners in headphones (beyerdynamic, BRAGI), television set-tops (LOEWE), airline seatbacks (Panasonic), and car manufacturers (Volkswagen). 

Designing a co-brand meant a lot of DO NOT DOs, in addition to how to use our logo in the most appropriate and useful way (you'd be surprised). To mitigate this process, I built a Partners Brand Resource microsite to make things simpler for marketing integration. 

Animation

For the world-famous 2018 IFA Consumers Electronics Show, Mimi announced partnerships with beyerdymanic (headphones), LOEWE (televisions) + Mimi Defined. The MarCom team requested animated bumpers that could be shown at the booth and for the upcoming online campaign. I developed a concept based on mesmerizing animated gifs that were visual metaphors for what attributes Mimi Defined offers the user: clarity, definition, detail, focus, personalized, and uniqueness. Each of the attributes would utilize the dots that make up the Mimi Defined logo, offering brand recognition through repetition. I designed and animated 12 x 3 second modular bumpers that that could be assembled in any order.

Marketing Campaigns 

To support the MarCom team, I led the initiative in providing assets and help with concepts ranging from idents to Facebook posts. Some requests were as simple as delivering logo treatments and others more complex, such as building assets for brochures, trade show booths and presentations.

Back to Work

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