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Walmart International needed to stand up an innovation studio within their organization to develop digital products that would help their teams work better. It would be a distinct team with a separate space in their offices to create an innovation “culture within the culture”. Their team came to me to help create an internal brand to reflect this effort.
I worked closely with leadership at Walmart International and our internal RevUnit team to propose a name and simple visual brand identity for the innovation effort.
We initially met to understand the kind of culture the team wanted to create. In order to get traction with this newly formed team, they felt creating a name and visual brand was important. They wanted to be distinct from the overall Walmart brand; something modern, innovative and fresh.
Initially pitched with a generic name, the team was having a hard time deciding on what to call this effort. After mind mapping and debating several options, we settled on “Studio X”. It was descriptive enough for someone to understand what they were doing, but left room for extension — the “X” being a fill in the blank for the variety of projects they’d be tackling. It also represented the multiple they hoped to give their organization through their innovation work.
We chose two bold colors to represent the brand: black and a warm yellow. The yellow gave homage to the parent Walmart brand and created a bright pop of color against black or white backgrounds. The type treatment for the wordmark was bold and modern, with an extended width. A simple break in the X created a distinct symbol we could use on its own.
