The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
After 13 years, BB Agency has become Afternow. Started as two brothers on the island of Krk in Croatia, and now a team of 60 working across the world that’s brought in by B2B tech companies at the point where something in the business has shifted. “The name still sounded like a small local studio taking briefs.” Admitting that took a while. Renaming a company is a huge risk, but when they finally stopped postponing, the decision was quickly justified. The work began with four strategy workshops, more than 10 people in each session, homework in between, and everything up for grabs, from positioning, values and services to how the agency wins and loses work. In our conversation, we explore it all.
TBI Hi Afternow team! How are things?
AN Very good, thank you. Busy in the best way. We worked on this quietly for a long time, so watching it finally live in public, on the website, in proposals, in how the team talks about the work, is a strange and satisfying feeling.
TBI For those meeting Afternow for the first time, set the scene. Who are you, and where does the company come from?
AN We are a team of around sixty people, working from the island of Krk in Croatia and from cities across the world, mostly with B2B tech companies. The work spans strategy, brand, websites and product, handled as one connected system rather than as separate projects. Until this year, we were called BB Agency.
The work changed a lot along the way. Clients used to come to us to design and build things. Over the years, they started coming to us to help them decide what to build and why, usually at a moment when something in their business had shifted. That move from execution to decisions is the story this rebrand comes from.
TBI So when did the name BB Agency start feeling wrong?
AN BB Agency was right for a long time, and there is a lot of history in it. But at some point, the company had changed more than the name had. The team was international, the work was strategic, the relationships were long-term, and the name still sounded like a small local studio taking briefs. It no longer explained who we had become or where we were going.
Honestly, we waited longer than we should have to admit that. Renaming a company you built feels like a risk, so you keep finding reasons to postpone it. The moment we stopped postponing was the moment the real work started.
Renaming a company you built feels like a risk.
TBI You approached this as a positioning system rather than a visual refresh. What does that mean in practice?
AN A visual refresh would not have been enough. The problem was never that the old brand looked bad. The problem was that it no longer gave us structure for how we speak, sell, hire, create and show up in the market.
So we treated the rebrand as one connected system. Strategy, naming, messaging, visual identity, website and internal alignment all had to work together and inform each other. The identity needed to be useful, not just attractive. It had to help people understand what kind of partner we are, which situations we are relevant for and why our way of working matters.
For us, brand is not a layer you apply at the end. It is a system that helps the company move with more clarity. That belief shaped every decision that followed, so it made sense to start there.
TBI Before any design happened, you ran the whole team through a series of strategy workshops. What happened in those rooms?
AN Four deep workshops, facilitated by Irene from our strategy team, with more than 10 people in each session. We dissected everything. Positioning, values, services, marketing, sales, how we win work, how we lose it. Everyone had homework between sessions, and it was brutally demanding. We put our team through the same process we put clients through, with no shortcuts, because it was us.
It would have been much easier to let the founders decide in a room and present the result. It also would have produced a weaker brand. The reason Afternow feels cohesive is that the thinking was stress-tested by the people who live it every day. For the first time, the brand feels like we are comfortable in our own skin, and that comfort was earned in those workshops, not designed afterwards.
TBI Being your own client is famously difficult. How did that go?
AN It is humbling. With client work, you can create distance and help them see themselves clearly. With your own company, every option feels personal, and every truth you have to face is your own.
It was also useful in a way we did not expect. A full rebrand is a serious investment, and somewhere inside every client company, there is a person who has put their credibility on the line to get it approved. We talk a lot internally about making our clients feel like they entered a safe harbour, with a dedicated team guiding them through a complex process. Sitting on the client side of our own process, feeling that same weight of the decision, was a strong reminder of why that matters. You do not forget what the anxiety feels like once you have carried it yourself.
TBI How did the identity system and logo come to be?
AN A lot of the decisions were made in direct response to the issues we had with the previous identity. Strategically, we needed to signal maturity and a scale more reflective of where we are today. The old identity was making us feel smaller and more startup-like than we wanted to project. Our clients are looking for a partner that can balance creative and technical thinking extremely well, so getting that balance right was central to everything. We also needed something that gave us more freedom to express ourselves, with room for experimentation and novelty without losing coherence.
We achieved that through two distinct registers. On one end, a tight core: a simple wordmark, single-weight typeface, a layout system, and a black-and-white palette. On the other hand, playful glyphs, an expressive secondary colour palette and experimental illustration styles. The identity can be dialled back and understated when we want to speak with confidence and let the work take centre stage, or more expressive and playful when we're sharing a point of view, showing up on social, or communicating internally.
The modularity of the logo sits at the heart of that. The name describes a company built for what comes next, so a frozen identity would have contradicted it from day one. Typography within the wordmark is interchangeable, which means the identity can shift its expression while staying unmistakably itself.
In that sense, the identity mirrors the name. Afternow is a fixed set of simple rules combined with looser parameters that can flex and evolve with us over time. Behaving the way we do.
TBI You developed the verbal identity with Camilla Petty. What problem was the voice solving?
AN Our world is full of technical language. Behind every client ambition, there are practical problems to solve – product architectures, brand systems, development frameworks, strategic planning. Left alone, that vocabulary makes everything sound heavier than it needs to be.
Once we had defined the strategy internally, Camilla came and helped us find a voice that balances technical depth with language that is light, confident, and clear. The result is that we can talk about complex work without sounding like documentation, and we can be visionary without becoming vague. Finding your own voice is harder than finding one for a client. Having someone from outside hold up the mirror made all the difference. She nailed it!
TBI A whole naming architecture is growing out of the name. After Talks, After Hours, Design Now, Hire Now. Was that designed or did it emerge?
AN Both. We knew from the naming process that Afternow opened this door, and it was part of why the name won. Since then, it keeps proving itself. After Talks is our docuseries. Design Now frames our perspective on our journal page. Hire Now is how we announce roles. After Hours are our Friday sessions for culture building, the more playful side of the company.
TBI Motion seems to run through everything, from brand to social to the website. How was that built?
AN As one language, developed side by side with the identity and website and then systematised to be applied everywhere. Aleksa defined the motion principles, and they carry across the brand, social content, and the website. Everything moves with the same identity.
What this way of working unlocks is something harder to plan for. Gestures that could only exist because different creatives are working together. The echo effect in the navigation and footer is a good example. It’s not a feature that was specified upfront. It emerged from having animators, designers and developers working together.
Most companies update their brand too late.
TBI The organisations you work with are navigating the same kind of change. What do they get wrong?
AN Most companies update their brand too late. The business evolves, the product matures, the audience shifts, and externally, the company still looks and sounds like an older version of itself. Internally, teams stop being aligned. Externally, buyers do not immediately understand the value. When markets move fast, that gap gets expensive quickly.
The second mistake is rushing straight into output. New logo, new website, problem solved. Responding well means understanding the situation first. What changed, what needs to be clarified, what the market needs to believe, and what has to align internally before the company can show up differently. The companies that handle this well connect brand, product, and website instead of treating them as separate exercises. We went through it ourselves this year, so we say this with some scar tissue.
TBI What can we expect from Afternow in the coming months?
AN More work for companies going through meaningful change, focused on the situations where we can be most useful. More of how we think, not only what we make. After Talks is coming, more stories and perspectives are coming, and more of the work itself will be visible.
The rebrand was not the finish line. It gave us a stronger foundation, and now the job is to keep proving it through the clients we partner with and the decisions we make next.