Well hello Compuco!

The team and I are very pleased to (finally!) be able to share some very exciting news with you. It’s been a long time in the works, but (as you may have noticed from our new website), we are proud to be launching our new brand today, with a (slight!) change to our name and a completely new visual identity.

Gone is the old blue of Compucorp and in comes the green of Compuco! 🚀🎉🥳🚀🎉🥳

Whilst it’s only a few letters different, it’s a significant step in helping us to communicate to the wider world who we are and the work we do.

It’s been quite a journey to reach this point and I’d like to take the opportunity to explain some of the thinking behind the decision and share the road that we’ve travelled down these past few months. (Perhaps make a cuppa tea first... it's a long post!).

Why Change?

An image of Compucorp legacy calculators including the Compucorp 326 scientist

A very good question... to which there are several answers. We were originally founded back in the 1970’s when bell-bottoms were in fashion, sideburns were expected and the personal computer looked a lot more like an ATM than the sleek laptops we use today.

It was a completely different era of technology and hence the original company name “Compucorp” came from the combination of the words ‘computer’ and ‘corporation’.

Over the decades since, we have evolved significantly and have now reached a stage where we feel the original brand and name no longer reflects our mission or ethos as a team.

The team has evolved, as has our mission and values. Our sole focus is around helping “socially responsible organisations build a better world” and our team's commitment to that mission is what makes us unique.

All in all, we wanted the brand to reflect who we really are as people and what it would be like to work with us.

Why Compuco?

Once we decided to change the name, the natural question was what would we replace it with?

We wanted something that represented our fresh outlook and bold nature (the term Pineapple was mentioned more than once…), but we didn’t want to completely lose our ties to the past. The company has a legacy spanning over 40 years, influencing technology during its most transformational period, so it was important to us to remain connected to that history.

The ‘corp’ of Compucorp, representing a large corporate entity however, felt out of place with who we are now as an organisation.

So the big question was how to iterate? After a few sleepless nights we whittled down our shortlist, and finally unanimously settled on Compuco

The name reflects the history we are proud of, but also represents our evolution.

People are at the heart of everything we do. Both in terms of our team, but also who we work with and the ‘co’ is a perfect summary of this ethos. It encompasses the concepts of coworking; collaborating; the coalescence of ideas and importantly to cocreate and be part of a community - all words representing our purpose of working with others to achieve shared goals.

We remain the same proud innovators as ever, working hard with socially responsible organisations enabling them to be the best they can possibly be.

What’s Behind the New Look?

But changing the name is only the first step. To truly convey who we are and what it would be like to work with us we also needed to rethink our visual identity. This meant looking at our fonts, brand colours and approach to imagery. We are a team of humans after all and we wanted the new brand to reflect that!

We landed on the paradigm of being “human centric”. The brand needed to represent the fact that we are a team of humans working for the collective benefit. 

Blue has been a stalwart brand colour for us (used by 35% of brands in their logos and 40% of the Fortune 500). It was chosen originally to reflect our reliability and experience, but it could also be seen as clinical and impersonal. That's certainly not what we are like to work with!

After some research and exploration by our wonderful design team we found the exotic sounding “caribbean green”. This fresh colour reflects our team's energy, friendliness and profound desire to collaborate.

The font selection also needed to reflect these human centric principles. That meant a move away from sharper edges to more rounded human forms. The logo font, “Fredoka One” is a rounded sans serif font, designed to be bold for titles. It’s bold nature gives it a playfulness which represents how work can be fun, yet there is a slight calligraphic element that maintains depth and responsibility. 

Fredoka One Font Examples
Fredoka One Font

This is paired with Poppins for our headers and Work Sans for our body text. Poppins is one of my personal favourite fonts (we almost made it the CiviCRM Shoreditch theme font!) and has a wonderful geometrical structure and almost circular boul. Work Sans is a neo-grotesque font and is extremely readable. It also has a sense of grace, like a historic typewriter, yet as it doesn’t have a serif, it maintains that sense of friendliness and accessibility we sought. Together we feel these will uplift the materials we create whilst maintaining a balance between professionalism and friendliness.

Our amazing team is what makes us unique and a key objective of the rebrand was to communicate the diversity, vibrance and commitment that the team show everyday.

We’ve built up quite a library of images of the team over the years. Whilst some would be better kept hidden (!) the new website is a great opportunity for us to share some images of the team at work and to show some of the hardworking faces that clients don’t often get to see.

We also specifically wanted the new website to communicate the diversity of the team. Having team members from around the world, crossing continental boundaries, is one of the things that makes coming to work everyday extremely exciting for me and our culture page now starts to communicate that message.

Together we feel that these changes allow us to convey who we really are, what our values are and what it will be like to work with us.

Will this Impact Your Services? 

Not at all! In fact, the new brand and website will hopefully allow us to do so much more for our clients. The new site will let us better communicate our message with the world, provide insight on the platforms we work with and  share useful resources. Expect to see lots of new content here and across our social media channels in the coming months! 

Finally I just want to say a big thank you to all of the people that we’ve worked with over the years, who have supported us to get to this point. It’s been a privilege to work with you and we hope that we can continue to achieve amazing things together.

We’re very excited about the future of the company and want to thank you for being a part of this journey.

As always, we’d love to hear from you so you can always get in touch here or email us at hello@compuco.io.

Best

Jamie Novick (on behalf of the whole Compuco team!)

CEO