Rhodium Group is a leading, independent research firm that combines economic research and policy expertise to provide governments, businesses, and the NGO sector with valuable insights into global trends. Looking to rethink their communications and digital strategy, Rhodium’s leadership asked Constructive to refresh their brand identity and create a new website and publishing system so that they would reflect the firm’s expertise, make their sought-after research more accessible, and deliver actionable insights to an audience of experts and leaders across the private and public sectors.
Uniting Quantitative Rigor & Qualitative Expertise
We started with stakeholder research, engaging Rhodium’s research and policy experts to understand the different ways the firm’s work impacts governments, businesses, and nonprofit associations around the world. A recurring theme was Rhodium’s combination of rigorous economic research, unique methodology, and big-picture economic insights. Our resulting strategy focused on developing a new brand and website that strengthens Rhodium’s positioning as a leading independent agency that delivers high-value quantitative insights and actionable analysis for influential audiences.
A Bold Brand Built on Insights
Alongside digital strategy, our design team got to work redesigning Rhodium Group’s visual identity. A logo refresh and new design system of typefaces and colors are ideally suited to communicating long-form research and data-driven communications. Condensed sans-serif type with a diversity of weights are highly effective for bold headlines and smaller spaces in data visualizations. An elegant serif typeface increases legibility for Rhodium’s long-form content. And a robust palette of vibrant colors and tints supports the complex data visualizations Rhodium produces to help leaders in the public and private sectors make more informed economic and policy decisions.
Delivering a Brand Narrative & Economic Research
Rhodium Group’s website is, first and foremost, a platform for distributing its economic and policy research to influential leaders across the private and public sectors. It also speaks for the brand, helping to raise awareness of the agency to increase their reach and influence. To create the blueprint for advancing these and other priorities, we partnered with Rhodium’s leadership in a collaborative prototyping process to design a content-rich website that tells Rhodium’s story and gives audiences multiple ways to access and explore their research. The result helps audiences easily find content by topic, regions, and practice area, adding filtering tools that make it easy for audiences to find the research they’re most interested in.
A Website That Embodies Objective Expertise
To build a shared vision through our design process, we produced concept boards that gave Rhodium’s team different design concepts to evaluate. Visually, Rhodium’s new website embodies expertise and objectivity with a restrained color palette that’s focused, not flashy; using transparent color overlays that express Rhodium’s ability to objectively see through complex data and trends. Animated numbers and currency symbols demonstrate speak to the rapid pace of change in the global economy. And images of environments ground Rhodium’s global economic research in the real world.
Designed to Deliver Economic Insights
Rhodium Group’s website is visually understated to reflect the objective expertise that its brand is built on. However, we made this choice for another important reason—to place the focus on the firm’s economic research. By placing Rhodium’s reports, notes, testimonies, and data visualizations in a more restrained context, attention is placed where it should be—on delivering valuable online experiences that help audiences access, understand, and make use of Rhodium’s research.
A System for Producing Premium Publications
Rhodium’s work and the value in their brand is heavily driven by the agency’s highly sought-after research publications. To empower their research experts to quickly produce polished reports, briefs, and presentations we created a publication design system with flexible editorial grids, editorial styles, and data visualization templates. The results provide polish and precision for Rhodium’s work, making it easy for the agency’s experts to deliver high-value research in person and industry events.
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Learn More About Our Work
Get an up-close and detailed look at this project in our visual case study or explore Constructive’s design for science & research nonprofits.
