How We Learned That Heartiness Can Also Hurt

2024 | 4 min reading time

Sören Klingsporn on the art of self-expression

When I started at ZENTRALNORDEN seven years ago, our website was just a photo - and a matching audio loop. Plus a phone number and address. That was it!


Why don't we describe who we are and what we do in more detail? The answer to my question at the time was: “Anyone who wants something from us is welcome to call us.” This rather rudimentary understanding of self-marketing apparently worked somehow. However, it was then replaced by the realization that there was more to it. Since then, much more meaningful versions of our website have been created over time.

Landing page of the Zentralnorden website from 2018
ZENTRALNORDEN Website 2018

A journey that we set off on last fall with renewed motivation and courage. The clothes just didn't fit anymore. We had outgrown them. The button on our pants no longer fastened, the jacket was stretching at the shoulders. Time for a fresh start.

Now every relaunch offers the opportunity to question oneself - but also the obligation to sharpen one's own products, to pause for a moment and reflect. Not so easy in the hectic everyday life of an agency. Our own new website remained the final opponent in the battle with existing customer projects. Including a role switch: we suddenly found ourselves slipping into the role of demanding clients who wanted to have their say too quickly while we were in the middle of the design process. We ourselves tore through the deadlines for submitting texts. We didn't even want to accept the long timeframes for technical development. How arduous the journey to a new website is. We know!

More BAM effect and warmth: relaunch, identity & corporate design

Collection of various image and graphic elements of the new ZENTRALNORDEN website
Heart and heartache: our new CI and how we got there

We quickly realized that this was not just about a website, but that we needed to change our entire corporate design. And that brought us to a fundamental question: “Do we let our work speak for us?” and remain discreetly in the background, or “Do we want to show our identity?”. Ever since we launched our magazine BAM “Bock auf Morgen” four years ago, we knew that we wanted to do this: Despite all the understatement, it does us good to talk about who we are, how we work and what is important to us. This should also be the case on our new website - and suddenly we were in the middle of a corporate identity process. Yay! 😬

Our core value of cordiality has been with us for just as long as our vision “Bock auf Morgen”. But simply communicating heartiness to the outside world was not strong enough for us. We needed something that we could put alongside heartiness. A counterpart, an opponent. Fire and ice: “So hearty - it hurts!” was born. An exaggerated and all-embracing warmth that itself becomes a stylistic device. Lyrics with goose bumps, but without Diddl Mouse. Professional and still sweet - is that possible?

We think it works! It even works super well! Our new website is the first time that this new style and this new tonality can be felt externally. At the same time, we have worked out our products much more clearly, optimized the UX and freed up a lot of space for lovingly prepared cases.

»"We show a culture that has evolved and is now the “herb sauce that holds the ZN Döner together”.«
- Quote ZENTRALNORDEN Website

We play with animations and icons that have become established in our world of communication. We think it's a website that suits us well. It reflects us and our work and, above all, shows how and who we are. And with which we can now rightly bear the title we created ourselves: “Germany's heartiest agency”.

Done, the clothes fit again!

You can find more projects and cool designs in our portfolio.

Portfolio
Tags: Website, Relaunch, Prozesse, Corporate Design

Sören Klingsporn

CEO | ZENTRALNORDEN

With a background in design and tech, Sören has focused on conception and consulting for many years and has worked for major international brands. He has been CEO at ZENTRALNORDEN since 2021. He loves absurd questions in our weeklys, has an extensive collection of old Nintendo games in his closet and tinkers with beats in his bedroom.