Case notes
How do you brand a will without making it feel like a funeral?
Making a will is an emotional journey, not a form. Here is how that one idea shaped everything we made for Gowilled.
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Nobody wakes up excited to write a will. Most people know it matters. They nod, they agree, they say "haan, karna hai", and then they don't. When Gowilled came to us, the brief looked like a legal-tech brief. The real problem turned out to be a feelings problem.
Start with why people don't
Before we drew a single letter, we mapped how people feel at every step of making a will, and we surveyed 50 people about what stops them. The answer wasn't confusion about the law. It was emotional discomfort, family pressure and plain, honest procrastination.
That changed the job. We weren't designing a product that explains wills. We were designing one that makes the conversation feel okay to have.
Making a will is an emotional journey, not a form.
Four people at the dinner table
The research gave us four kinds of people we kept coming back to. The parent who wants the kids' future sorted. The one who finds talking about death unnecessary, or just awkward. The sceptic who questions legal tech and prefers paper records. And the one who wants to be remembered, and cares about doing it properly.
Every design decision had to work for all four at once. That's a tall order for a logo. It's a fair order for a whole brand.
A blue that calms instead of warns
Legal brands love navy, gold and serious serifs. All very trustworthy, all very "please read the fine print". We went with Sapphire Blue: trust, transparency and serenity, the exact opposite of legal anxiety.
Then came a custom display typeface, Gowilled Display, drawn by Saumya Kothari, so the brand could sound like itself in every headline. Clear and calm for forms and buttons, with enough character to feel like a person and not a portal.
Speak like the families we come from
The voice was the fun part. Gentle, witty and lovingly sarcastic: calm about the serious stuff, light about everything else. The kind of thing your favourite aunt would say to get you moving.
- Will-making so simple, your chachi could do it between shows.
- Will ready before your morning chai goes cold.
- Life's not dumb charades. Don't leave your kids guessing.
Humour does real work here. It lowers the shoulders. Once someone smiles at a billboard about wills, the hardest part, starting, gets a little easier.
What we took away
When a category is built on fear, the brave move is warmth. Find the feeling that stops people, and design against it. Everything else, the colour, the type, the jokes, follows from there.