Longtime Whipsaw partners Tile/Life360 just announced a new line, designed by Whipsaw. Capturing the zeitgeist, these new designs revitalize traditional trackers by featuring bold colors and cute forms in order to better showcase the end user’s unique personality and style. These new trackers embody a fresh brand evolution for Tile and Life360.
Whipsaw and Tile have partnered annually on new design and innovations, including their Pro, Mate, Slim, and Sticker product lines. Tile’s historic focus has been on tracking objects, the things we all have that are easily lost, like keys and wallets. In 2021, Tile joined the Life360 family, adding hardware tracking capabilities to Life360’s robust software platform. According to the press release at that time, Chris Hulls, Life360’s founder and CEO, said, “This is genuinely the most impactful deal in our company’s history, and along with the addition of Jiobit from earlier this year, our vision of linking people, pets and things all in one place is now complete, putting us closer to realizing our vision of being the world’s leading platform for safety and location services. Individuals and families around the world will now be able to quickly and easily locate the people, pets, and things they love all from one mobile platform.”
Life360’s platform covered people, while Tile focused on things. The merging of Tile and Life360 was a perfect symbiotic pairing. However, combining these two established brands while maintaining the audience for both, was no easy task. Each party comes from years of commitment to their brand, and from the legacy of decisions made to cement the strength of that brand. In this case, it was particularly interesting to have a front-row seat to the nuances of Life360’s software-first platform, which was intended to complement Tile’s hardware-first company. The Life360 customers tend to be families across the center of the country, compared to Tile’s key market of early tech adopters on the coasts. The design we established in the past for Tile was tech-forward and utilitarian, but Life360’s brand conveyed a friendly, colorful ethos. Tactically, we had to find a balance between the original hardware audience and Life360’s lifestyle-oriented product. It had to be both. It even needed two logos - Life360 and Tile. We were concerned about putting two logos on such a small product because it was just too small. Ultimately the round Life360 logo became the center button touchpoint, and the Tile logo became the nameplate.
Whipsaw partnered with Tile/Life360 to explore what it means to locate loved ones in addition to inanimate objects. The team explored how you convey love for others through rituals demonstrating care. Think about how you show people that you care for them. Maybe it’s a personal note in a lunchbox, a luggage tag shared with a loved one before a journey, or jewelry and charms given to a sweetheart.
People give one another things to show they care, and this sentiment led us to thinking about the design like we do candy and chocolates. Designer Grace Budgett pointed out that "our desire to emulate the joy of chocolates and candy gave us clarity on where we wanted to take the design language — making it a special gift for loved ones to give to each other." Tile products are sold in sets, reminiscent of a little box of chocolates and now the design team had the opportunity to expand into bright pops of color like artisanal candies.
The Whipsaw design process is highly collaborative. Each week over the months we worked with Tile/Life360, we showed concepts, narrowing them down weekly in a series of collaborative dialogues. Early in the process, we started showing colors to broaden the conversation from traditional Tile tones. Designer Chloe Georgiades said, “As part of my design process, in almost every project, as much as possible, I like to start exploring color early on, mixing and matching. It was clear that this product line needed to be friendly and lively, so color felt called for. In early explorations when you add color you can tell a story better about different elements in a concept. Applying color is functional for explaining a concept because you can make certain elements jump off the page.”
We like to start exploring color early on in the design process to start figuring out the correct expression of the product and to help tell the concept's story. Applying color is emotional and functional since people are naturally drawn to color. It helps set the right tone and highlights the correct focal elements of each design. As a suite of products often sold in sets, we needed each color SKU to work well as part of a group. This helps to emphasize the larger ecosystem of Life360, and how the sum is more significant than each object.
The team continued to present color combinations, both in 2D and 3D renders, followed by ordering many color samples. We hosted an immersive workshop with C-suite participants to evaluate colors and trends. The entire team dove into mixing and matching, viewing colors in different lights, and evaluating the personalities of the colors. This spirited workshop left the Whipsaw conference room table with a kaleidoscope of color squares (tiles, if you will).
We pushed hard to explore options and to move beyond expected palettes. We leverage our unique perspective as a design team that is tapped into current color trends and is informed by work across almost every industry, including global perspectives. If we use color trend research, it’s as an input and an inspiration, but we expect to push beyond what everyone already knows, to be leading edge. A designer’s eye is critical here. Great work is a balance between inspiration and research. We are taste-makers, so while we consult sources, we are also synthesizing and curating a world of inputs.
Ultimately, the Tile/Life360 team’s new product line also includes a black and midnight version, but like a box of chocolates, there are enough variations to appeal to everyone. Each person can individualize the product and it becomes an accessory, a charm, and a symbol that you are cared for.
It’s this spirit of care that profoundly infuses our work with partners like Tile/Life360. We bring our whole, opinionated, creative selves to the table, ready to create something new with our partners. Like Cole Derby said, “Because of the long-term relationship, our team feels comfortable voicing our opinions and sticking to them. We can say what we want, and they trust us because of our track record of delivering success together. There’s a good back and forth in the partnership, it’s full of candor, and it’s fun.”
See more from this project: Life360 Tile Trackers
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