Rock Hero

Rock Hero logo is a hand holding a white delivery bag over a large red letter R, the hand and arm are cutout of the R, showing the dark purple background.

Rock Hero is a delivery service in Gibraltar (known locally as the 'Rock') that brings all kinds of shopping to your door. Demand for their services increased dramatically during COVID, and with it, the need to improve their branding. We were commissioned to rethink their existing logo, and develop a brand around it that could be used across a very wide range of contexts and surfaces. It had to be as effective on vans and delivery bags, or thermal printed receipts, as it was on digital.

We started by looking at their local competitors Glovo, Just Eat and montgó, and where they sat on the hue spectrum. We also considered similar companies from neighbouring European countries:

The hue scale starts with Delivery Hero at Red, Just Eat at Orange, Glovo at Yellowy Orange, gó and Uber Eats at Green and Wolt at Bluey Green.
Displaying competitors (bottom row) on the hue spectrum reveals some missing colours - particularly in the blue to pink range.

This lead us to developing a colour palette that would separate them from the herd. As Rock Hero delivers more than just food, there weren't the usual constraints of typical food related colour schemes. Next we identified the main issues with the existing logo, based on the metaphor of a delivery box. Not only was this not obvious, it looked evil/scheming and it's busy palette didn't work on any backgrounds other than white:

The old Rock Hero logo is a brightly coloured geometric face, suggesting an abstracted delivery bag and box.

We also had to be careful to avoid other meanings of ‘Rock’, such as outdoor sports or music. An early idea we explored, was echoing the iconic shape of the rock of Gibraltar as a hero's cape caught in the wind:

A photo of Gibraltar Rock, a simplified outline of the rock and a cape blowing the wind in a similar shape. A mocked up poster shows a black and white illustration of a delivery rider, with the brightly coloured cape attached. Large white letters behind him say Anything Delivered

However, our chosen solution was to use negative space within a large red R to convey the delivery driver's hand, holding up the customers bag.

Rock Hero logo is a hand holding a white delivery bag over a large red letter R, the hand and arm are cutout of the R, showing the dark purple background.

This was accompanied by the choice of Galano Grotesque as the typeface, and a wide colour palette that could be used with the logo. We also designed a monochrome version, to work on receipts:

The colour palette showing a range of purple tints, along with alternative accent colours, Reds, Orange, Pink, Green and Blue
Samples of the brand typeface, Galano Grotesque. It is a bold modern, geometric sans serif
A mockup of the delivery van, with the rock hero logo, the strapline 'You Shop, We Deliver' and marketplace icons to show they deliver more than food.
Delivery Van Graphics

The logo informed the illustration style for the rest of the project, where the hand would be holding a shopping item, cut-out of the background colour. We also created a full set of colour icons to represent each of the shopping sub-categories:

The style rules for the marketplace category icons are: Object breaks the circle where possible, Hand is shown holding the object and ‘cutout’ of the icon, Shading is applied sparingly, Rock Hero Colour Pallete is used where possible (an exception would be food such as the burger)
A series of 59 illustrative full colour icons showing the range of shopping categories, such food, drink, DIY, clothing and cosmetics.
Marketplace Category Icons

This style continued through to contexts, such as the App Store preview images, showing the customer journey :

A series of images shows an app interface on smartphones, highlighting features such as ordering, local shopping, offers, order tracking, delivery, various options, and free returns.
Preview screens for the App Store listing

We also setup Rock Hero with a series of templates for social media posts in Canva. It's the perfect tool for this, as it allows the uploading and usage of the brand fonts, setting up of colour palettes, and recolouring of SVG assets. This meant many variations of five layouts could easily be created, using colours from the palette that suited the subject matter.

A series of sample social media posts in a square format. Each one uses a shape from the Rock Hero logo in the background, the R or the delivery bag.

About

Hicks.design is Jon Hicks, collaborating with clients worldwide from my studio in Oxfordshire, UK, since 2002. I am most known for my branding work for Firefox, MailChimp and Shopify, but my skills cover a much broader spectrum of services and mediums. Read more about my services or contact me for help with your next project!