You may be wondering why you are arriving on Outsprung.com instead of Internet Marketing Hustle. Well I have rebranded the blog to be more inline with my future goals. There are a few reasons why i decided to make the change.

• I wanted to change the name for some time. Internet Marketing Hustle sounded slightly gimmicky and immature. I didn’t feel comfortable reaching out to people.
• The domain looks spammy and is too long. I bought the domain back in 2009 when exact match domain were all the rage so I was just looking for something that had ‘internet marketing’ in it as that’s what I was blogging about.

So What Is Outsprung?

Outsprung is an agency and blog dedicated to marketing and design. The aim of Outsprung is the same as our original blog; To help people grow their online business. We do this 2 ways:

1. Writing quality content that helps users with various problems and giving insights into various online industries.
2. Providing quality, affordable marketing and design services.

I’ve teamed up with a few guys and girls from London and now offer a range of services to help bloggers and small businesses. We’ll be fleshing out the site with more detail on the services. We offer everything from web design to content creation and really excited to broaden our current client list.

The business that I generated from the blog was also another driving factor to changing the site. Internet Marketing Hustle was just a blog, I had a few clients that hired me through the blog and I wanted to emphasise that I offered services. It was impossible to do this with the current blog and design.

The Process

The rebranding process was fun. The hardest point was finding a brand name that suited the new direction we wanted to take the blog and also a domain that was available in a .com extension. It took a lot of thinking and combining or words and meanings. Two tools that really helped me with the brainstorming process were:

• Thesaurus.com
• Namemesh.com

After days of scribbling notes and ideas for a new name I finally found the perfect brand ‘Outsprung’. It was short, snappy and communicated what I wanted (outwards growth).

The Branding

After securing domains and various social media accounts it was time to work on the branding. We went through lots of different iterations and even got the help from some guys we regularly work with in a brainstorming session.

Our first run of ideas led us down the hand written style. The hand drawn element was fun but we didn’t want the entire logo to be in the hand drawn style. We felt it didn’t look as professional as we wanted. We did want to keep some aspect of the hand drawn style in the logo as it retained the helpful, happy and youthful feel to the name (and ourselves). And anyone who’s spent more than 10 minutes in my company will know I’m not serious all the time.

So we went back to the drawing board (literally) and sketched more ideas on how to incorporate hand drawn with a san serif font. We also wanted to try and design a mark within the logo that could be used across all mediums. During one evening of brainstorming my girlfriend who is very much my creative partner in almost all my personal projects grabbed the pen and just drew the letter ‘O’. Genius! After some iterations we had the start of a great logo.

I was looking for the blend of simplicity, professionalism and a touch of artistic expression. The letter ‘O’ encapsulated all this. Our letter ‘O’ was a simple circle with an added twist.

Picking apart the new symbol it was clear that it couldn’t be a perfect circle. Whilst beautiful in its balance and simplicity the confined circle lost it’s hand drawn effect. So we used this sketch as an outline and hand drew the letter in Illustrator. After many, many tries we nailed it.

Over the next week we’ll post more insight into the rebranding and how we handled moving to the new domin and everything else we learned along the way so stay tuned.

Lastly I’d like to hear your thoughts on our rebranding. Do you like it? Dislike it? Hit me up in the comments, we’d love to hear from you.