Meet the new face of Pickyourtrail!

New Year, New Beginnings — New office, Revamped Website, Newer faces in the office. The biggest bang of all — our new logo. Redefining the face of Pickyourtrail.

Over the past 5 years, our brand outlook has matured from a fun, young brand into an empathetic, warm and trustworthy brand. As we aim to be the go-to platform for anything international, clear brand identity was the first step. While there are various facets to identity, we are starting off with the visual identity — the typeface, colours, logo and slowly moving into other aspects like tone, packaging, touch and feel.

This post is a quick reflection of our thought process behind the whole makeover and how we unwrapped ourselves. This is a story of how we arrived!

A bit about our old logo

The paper plane — it was one of the many new visual identities that we had experimented. As a travel brand, we always wanted a logo that indicated motion — like the twitter bird or Nike swoosh. The paper plane — It meant a lot of things to a lot of people. Firstly, Hari, the Co-Founder seemed like he had found his colour. ‘If you wake him up in the middle of his slumber and ask him the colour code of yellow, he’ll say it. I don’t know it myself’, laughs Anand, our Graphic Designer. It is probably even his favourite colour. To confirm that, we went up to him and asked, upon which he immediately said FEDD06.

To travellers who tried our product, the paper plane meant flying, whizzing off to their next getaway and memories. The yellow fill in the background symbolized the sun, reminding them of outdoors, spring and sunny memories. It gave it a ‘riding-off-into-the-sunset’ like appearance.

Add a catchphrase and an emphasis on ‘Pick’, out came this logo that you can see above.

The problem

However good this new face was, it still had three key issues, it was never perfect.

• It was close to impossible to overlay this across multiple imagery and colour scheme
• The trail meant that it didn’t fit well easily across all sizes
• The paper plane was becoming ubiquitous — email apps, chat apps just too many planes flying around!

The brand couldn’t scale the way we wanted it to.

Our journey of reinvention

So, we went back to the drawing board, re-wrote what the brand meant for us. As we probed deeper, we understood that we weren’t here to create just itineraries, but rather give people memories. Our product, hassle-free itineraries, customer-priority and the travel-love of our team had to culminate in one brand. And, so we began again.

Several strenuous brainstorming sessions later, our team along with Samudra, our genie, had a list of all the tiny travel-encapsulating things. We thought of fridge magnets, compass, binoculars, bikes, maps, train tickets etc. The truth was that there are different kinds of travellers, ranging along a vast spectrum. To some it was self-discovery, nature, visiting new countries and getting to know new cultures. To pick an item that meant something to one group meant losing out on the other. So, we’ll leave it to you on imagining how difficult it would have been.

Finding the right ingredients

Every brand, especially those that aspire to make a mark on the consumer psyche need an identity that is simple, memorable and relatable. When we set out to rebrand ourselves, we were keen on creating something that will grow on our user base, something they could own and carry around. Getting upgraded from our widely loved paper-plane logomark was not just to escape from the cliche of its use and to build a more practical identity system, but to also represent a higher order of meaning. Something that could translate to each one of our customers in their own way and become relatable. Thus evolved Veho — the new logomark of Pickyourtrail.

Amidst all this chaos the concept of Flag was something that struck a great chord. To travel may mean different things to different individuals. For some, it is self-discovery and spiritual healing. For someone else, it is the eagerness to explore and conquer the unknown or even a temporary getaway to get recharged. We wanted the logomark to be identifiable at any of these layers of need and that’s how the flying flag found its way in defining the inner spirit of the Veho.

As a business, we are also in a space where we let travellers make smart independent and personalised choices, but also provide them with beautiful insights and guidance to make their journeys meaningful and memorable. We let them pick their travel preferences, pick flights that suite their comfort and hotels that fulfils their expectations. We do not sell travel, but we ensure an end-end vacation experience. The tag profile that envelope the flag is a manifestation of those choices. Of your pick of preferences, prices, routes and everything where you have a choice to pick and choose from. Like the flag, we are also in constant motion, characterised by the slight tilt on the mark. Nudging and rekindling the inherent urge in everyone to unwrap the world through disrupting this industry by innovation, enhancing the customer experience and happiness.

Say ‘hello’ to Veho

We call our new logomark ‘Veho’. A name that has stuck on to us since our initiation.

Veho — /ˈwe.hoː/ , [ˈwɛ.hoː]

Verb:
1. carry, bear, convey, transport
2. (passive) ride, borne

Usage:
May be used to mean carried by a person, riding a horse, ferried by ship, and many other means of conveyance.

It was never a ‘Let there be light and there was light’ scenario when it came to Pickyourtrial’s logos. Trial and error was the norm. Our design team kept churning out magic out of their spool, nevertheless. As for the result, we couldn’t have asked for more. Throughout the time we were writing this, we kept glancing up to the hanging confetti of logos on the roof and couldn’t help smile every single time. The warmth that comes with a belly full of food and a heart full of innocent pride is coursing through us now.