After nearly a decade in business, FishingBooker is launching a new look. Open the website, and you’ll find a brand new logo and icon that describe who we are and what we offer.
We want to make ourselves easier to relate to and work with, and this is the first step. Here’s what’s behind the change and how it will affect you.
The Reasoning
We’re proud of where we’ve come in the last 9 years. Millions of people have gone fishing with us and we’ve received some amazing feedback about how easy they’ve found it to find and book fishing charters. We’re honored to work with thousands of professional guides and are proud to have made it harder for unlicensed captains to get business.
But there were some problems:
- Our company visuals – particularly our logo – didn’t match with what we do, so it wasn’t easy to tell how FishingBooker works from a glance
- Our purpose and direction weren’t clearly visible on our website
- We didn’t have a memorable graphic that captains could use to attract more business with us
This was slowing us down from reaching more customers beyond online search engines. It also made it harder to launch new products and features that were related to, but not exactly the same as, our main website.
We wanted to improve the way we look and how we communicate so that anyone could easily recognize FishingBooker and understand what we do. We thought: If we can make it as easy to understand our company as it is to book with us, we’ll be able to help fishing guides get more business while making it even easier for people to find and book a trip.
But that’s not all. This month, we’re launching a new app for customers. To do so, we really need a recognizable symbol for our brand. There’s never been a better time to refresh our look.
The Process
It started with going back to basics. We analyzed thousands of reviews and dug deep with the company leadership to understand the key things we provide and how we want to continue to grow.
It might sound obvious now, but there was one central idea that kept coming back – both from our customers, and from our company. We make fishing trips easy.
Before FishingBooker, customers had to have a lot of local experience to book a fishing trip with confidence. Now, anyone can do it. Because of our detailed listings and stringent verification and review processes, everyone now has the information and security they need to find, book, and prepare for their perfect trip – no matter where they’re fishing.
In the past, guides who wanted to get more customers online had to risk thousands of dollars in order to even show up on searches, with no guarantee that it would pay off. Then, they had to spend their free time going back and forth with customers over the phone just to share basic details such as availability and trip rates. But now, guides can easily show up at the top of online searches at no upfront cost. And once they get booked, we deal with the legwork of accepting payments, changing dates, collecting reviews, and sending reminders to customers. Finally, guides can focus on fishing!
Looking at it from this perspective, everything clicked. Everything we do is focused on making it easier to go fishing, whoever and wherever you are. And so, our new tagline was born:
The Pinfish
Now that we knew where we were headed, we wanted to show this across our website and beyond. To do this, we needed a new logo.
Our original logo was created by FishingBooker’s founder and avid angler, Vukan, back in 2013. This was more than enough for testing whether the business had legs. But up until today, we’ve still been using more or less that same old design.
Jump forward to 2022, and we’re booking hundreds of thousands of fishing trips every year. We wanted our logo to describe the full experience we offer – and, quite simply, to be easier to read.
First of all, we wanted to do a better job of showing how we make it easy to go fishing. So, our designers perfected the “Pinfish” – our affectionate name for our cheerful new icon, which has a spot on its side just like the popular baitfish.
This is made up of three parts:
- A map pin: Choose where you want to fish
- A hook: Select & book the right trip for you
- A fish: Get out on the water and go fishing
Then, we ran several rounds of testing to find out what people thought when they saw the Pinfish. We gradually tweaked the design until we were sure that the meaning behind it was as clear to people who’d never heard of us as it was to us.
The Wordmark
The Pinfish is descriptive of our brand, but it’s a big change from our old look. We needed a way to keep the main element of our old logo – our brand name – without sacrificing the new style.
Our old logo was bulky and hard to read, especially in smaller sizes. But that wasn’t the only problem. Too many people were struggling to remember our full name! Not great, when this was really the only information our logo provided.
From “Fish Booker” to “Fisher Bucket,” we’ve heard all kinds of variations of FishingBooker over the years. It makes sense, then, that one of our top priorities was making our brand name easier to read.
We did this in three stages:
- Split the word “FishingBooker” over two lines
- Changed the font to match what we use in our videos
- Adjusted the lettering so that it was unique and referenced our nautical roots
We’ve been using the Montserrat font in our videos for some time and loved its simplicity and modernity. It made sense to use it as the basis for our logo’s wordmark.
But we knew that the font could still be more descriptive of what we do. So, our designers made a few tweaks. See the boat hull in the curve of the “F”? What about the waves in the other consonants? Now, our logo shows our brand for what it is: Straightforward, nautical, and going somewhere.
The Result
Thanks to the tests we’ve done so far, we’re confident that this change will make it easier for people who haven’t heard of us yet to understand what we do. This gives us more freedom to experiment with different types of marketing, meaning we can bring more customers to captains and fishing guides.
With a more memorable logo, we can make eye-catching badges, awards, and stickers that captains can use to promote their business. We’ve also made it even easier to book and prepare for fishing trips with our new app for customers!
What’s Next
This is just the beginning of making FishingBooker easier to use, understand, and enjoy. Over the next few months, we’ll be:
- Auditing and updating our communications to be more simple and straightforward
- Working on color palettes and visuals to show a more exciting side to fishing than just the blue of the water
- Making our typography easier to read, up to date, and consistent
- Improving the layout and logical order of parts of the product, such as the listing process
Stay tuned for more updates. We’re looking forward to you joining the ride!
