IML
Creating a product and visual identity for the International Musicians League. IML's 19 bands perform in over 10,000 events a year across the US, Canada, UK, Europe and Australia. Its different band configurations are put together from a network of 8,000+ professional musicians, allowing for the same band to play at multiple simultaneous events without affecting the quality of the service they provide.
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The Problem
(01)
Scaling brand and product across 19 bands, 10,000+ events, and a tiny marketing team.
Three key parameters defined the engagement.
The company's large scale of operations contrasts radically with the size of its small marketing team, so any solution had to be easily applicable across all bands, markets, and languages.
Customers only interact with one band when hiring IML's services, which means the true scale of the organization should remain invisible along the user journey. With weddings being the main event type, customers expect vendors to be small and owner-operated.
Many of the bands had been in business for years, but with the company focused on growth, limited branding work had been done for any of them.
The Solution
Common Factor took a systemic approach to these challenges, finding the optimal solution at the intersection of marketing value and scalability across all bands, markets, and languages. The work balanced the artistry and craftsmanship expected in the industry with the corporate, tech-oriented reality of the company behind it—which is, in fact, the source of many of these bands' differentials.
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Design Approach
(02)
A systemic brand structure and a modular website template for every band.
IML's Brand Structure
Initial efforts focused on creating a brand for the International Musicians League—internally referred to as IML—geared mainly toward internal use. To balance the corporate connotations of the name, we chose a lowercase representation of IML, built around a single line that symbolizes the network aspect of the company. An orange accent preserved continuity with the preexisting logo.
Branding the Bands
Because the bands are not explicitly linked to one another, we had room for less rigorous consistency when working on each individual brand. For continuity and sentimental reasons, most names and some logos were kept unchanged from previous iterations, with minor updates made where possible. The music industry usually allows for more experimental visual design, but a key aspect of these (cover) bands is their reliability and professionalism when it comes to providing unfailingly fun entertainment.
Websites
When the engagement began, all bands shared the exact same website (aside from the name). We approached the new generation of websites—launched at the end of 2018—from a product design perspective. After in-depth study of user flows on the existing websites, user research, and extensive conversations with internal stakeholders, we broke the structure down into modules that could be rearranged and reused throughout each site. Back-end functionality also shaped the thought process: the template had to be systemic enough to let each band feel as distinct as possible within a shared framework.
The result was a template built on a three-color scheme complemented by each band's accent color. With fonts and layout shared across all sites, each band's unique look relies heavily on visual media to stand apart.
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