KH 3.0: Announcing Our New Identity

Today is an important day for KnowledgeHut. We are proud to officially unveil the new branding our team has been working on for several months. This rebranding comes with much thought and consideration, and there’s a lot more to the new look than you might assume.

Our new avatar exemplifies what we have evolved into: a global ed-tech company that empowers professionals and enterprises with augmented capabilities across technologies that are disrupting the market.

Why did we rebrand?

KnowledgeHut was founded in 2011, and a lot has changed since then. Two compelling reasons led us down the path to rebrand. First, although we had expanded in size, product and reach over the years, we were still largely perceived as a people and process training provider. We now wanted to reposition ourselves as a platform for technology skill development.

Second, as the education market had evolved, we felt the need to reinvent and differentiate ourselves. Our rebranding thus began from the core of our business—our vision, mission, and values—and then radiated to its outward expressions.

Our quest to democratize frontier skills led us to distil down to the essence that learning by doing, skills retention and the ability to measure outcomes have become more important than ever. This shaped our new vision to deliver an impactful and outcome-oriented learning experience which serves as a guidepost declaring what KnowledgeHut stands for and where it is headed.

Further, we wanted to be deliberate about creating a vibrant and employee-friendly culture. Our six core values thus reflect how we’d like to be treated and the behaviors we’d like to encourage throughout our organization. These are the foundations on which we are building our culture. Our values have set us on a path to increase productivity company-wide, fuel innovation, and create a magnet to attract and retain top talent - and we intend to go about all of this with our characteristic ‘fun with passion’!

How we went about our new logo

A logo is synonymous with a company’s identity and needs to reflect who we are as a company. Our team worked to find something that appeared crisp, approachable, smart, friendly and connected andyet, professional.

While our newly articulated mission, vision and core values were a natural starting point, our brand needed to capture KnowledgeHut’s identity for everyone, regardless of whether they happen to work at one of our offices.

To distill this, we carried out several interviews with KnowledgeHut customers, both professionals and enterprise clients and gathered a couple of focus groups across cities to collect inputs from. We also examined competitors in the online learning space. Exploring who we weren’t was as important as exploring who we were.

Based on this research, two words surfaced that helped inform the look of the brand: outcomes and impacts. With the new brand, there is a shift from being a classroom-oriented training company to a blended learning provider and from being a facilitator to a course content curator and owner. Our single-minded focus is to create real impacts in job roles by assuring outcomes. You will also see this play out in our soon-to-be launched platform.

What our logo stands for

While creating a brand, it’s important to figure out the shape of the logo before thinking about the color. To keep from becoming influenced by color, we began working with just black and white. Most of the initial designs revolved around using the letters K and H. Eventually, this idea was exhausted without a clear winner and other explorations began to surface.

As the weeks continued, hundreds of logo explorations started to emerge and from there the team needed to narrow it down. We asked each person in the team to pick their top three. One by one, we rejected the rest, knowing that with each failure we were drawing closer to the new KnowledgeHut logo.

The logo we ended up with has a lot of meaning behind it. It is a set of simple shapes coming together to form the letters K and H in the shape of a five-pronged star.

Why a star? Because it embodies five core aspects of what we stand for as a brand, namely:

• It symbolizes our quest for excellence, which is one of our core values.
• It demonstrates our pursuit for fostering trust and establishing credibility, another of our core values
• Exemplifying inclusivity, a star shines its light for everyone, regardless of culture, geography, ethnicity, religion, age or gender.
• It encapsulates our focus on creating real impacts in job roles.
• It personifies our outcome-driven approach by guaranteeing them for the learner and the enterprise.

Once the shape of our logo was figured out, we knew our work was far from complete. The next major challenge was figuring out the colors. We knew that we wanted to go with orange, a warm color exuding optimism, enthusiasm and fun and one of our core values being fun with passion, it seemed a perfect fit.

To complement the orange, the team chose to go with a burst of bright modern colors - royal blue, meadow green, harlequin, magenta, chestnut rose, cyan and electric violet, dominated by navy blue. While orange signifies optimism, navy blue stands for trust and responsibility. Together, the colors signify change and transformation, influencing our personal as well as collective development and helping us experience a greater level of knowledge.

The psychology behind these two colors is fascinating. It sends out a bold message saying - we are transforming who you are, your career path, and we are changing your life with what we do.

To bring the logo to life, we moved away from flat colors to the idea of a color transition as it also speaks strongly to who we are. It is a transition from the old to the new, from who we were to who we are now.

The end of one story, the beginning of another

While the logo is certainly a huge part of our brand, there’s much more to it than just the logo. It is who we are as a company, how we make people feel and the experiences we’re able to deliver. It is the beginning of exciting things to come - a new journey to deliver impactful and outcome-oriented learning to create an innovative global workforce.

Since we finished with the rebranding, our product and engineering teams have been working hard to update the learning experience to fit our new identity.It has taken massive amounts of work, and for sure, there’s a lot more to go. But what we do know is that it will all be worth it in the end.

Change can be bumpy, but we at KnowledgeHut are dedicated and optimistic that we'll make this transition the best it can be.