Weareseventeen rebrands as Seventeen, with a suite of bespoke icons inspired by each team member’s personality

20 years is a long time to be working away in the creative industry. You’re busy with projects, clients, new ideas and growing teams, before you suddenly realise the two-man outfit you started out with has vastly changed, but does the rest of the world know that? And that’s all on top of working in a creative industry that feels constantly in flux. This was a situation weareseventeen – now Seventeen – found themselves in last year. While it originally started life as a duo running a moving image studio, it had slowly transformed into a creative agency, with a team of double figures to boot. The team realised it was high time to share their new inner-workings more formally, as well as taking a moment to celebrate how far they’d come – and how better to do so than with a good ol’ rebrand.

First off, its name has gone from weareseventeen to the more simple and snappy Seventeen. And while it has moved away from being solely defined as a motion studio, CGI and live action work still feature heavily in the new look, as shown in its logomark; in moving applications, the 1 and 7 tear apart before smashing together to create a pleasingly rounded amorphous shape. Its creation began with “countless sketches” of the number 17, which associate creative director Longbin Li gradually pared back to its “simplest shape”. Before long, Longbin realised that the loose shape of his sketches resembled a head, a nose, and then “began to evolve into something else entirely”. Longbin continues: “Since then it has continued to take on many interpretations: some see a house with a light on, others an elephant.” It’s this fluidity of interpretation and thought that the studio is keen to embody and embrace.

This ethos shines in the studio’s new positioning – Odd Minds. ‘Odd’ represents the agency’s dedication to non-conformity and originality, while ‘Minds’ represents the plurality of the business, and the creative heads that come together to make it what it is. It’s also visualised in a suite of personalised icons. “We asked each person to reflect on the different sides of their personality, their obsessions and fascinations, and distill that down into a singular thing,” says creative director Gary Roberts. “Ideally something metaphorical and surprising, the odder the better.” Once each of the 22-member team had decided on their icon, the illustrator Hugo Bernier realised them in his distinctly buoyant, ethereal style. There’s a duck, a mug of tea, a bowl of ramen, bouncing around the identity, as well as some more abstract icons. A wobbly line, maybe a sound wave? A handful of rocks, teetering in a tower. To summarise, the many facets of the rebrand are, in company partner Jade Annaw’s words: “our collective soul made visible.”

To coincide with the rebrand, Seventeen has also launched a new website that’s consciously pared back and user-centred. “We wanted to create moments of calm and silence, a deliberate contrast to the noise felt through information overload,” says Longbin. When you first reach the landing page you’re met by a centralised tower of colour blocks – or, as Longbin calls them “capsules”. Each capsule when hovered over reveals a project title, and then, when clicked takes you to the project’s case study. “All capsules are then connected by an infinite ‘thread’, a metaphor that carries storytelling weight; it’s a through-line that symbolises something that can be woven, extended, or unspooled over time, perfect for a living archive,” says Longbin. This considered website is the cherry on top of a rebrand that weathers a rapidly changing creativity industry by platforming what matters – the individuality of each person involved in the agency’s everyday.