A QUALCOMM spinoff and a flat-rate idea.

Cricket began as the consumer brand of Leap Wireless International, a company carved out of the chip and wireless firm QUALCOMM. The International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 2005) says Leap was incorporated in June 1998 and spun off to QUALCOMM shareholders in September 1998, with Harvey White, who had championed the spinoff, at its head. Leap was based in San Diego, and the San Diego Union-Tribune reported in April 2009 that its chief executive, Doug Hutcheson, who had been with the company since its inception, was credited with the original concept for Cricket.

That concept was simple. The Directory says the domestic subsidiary, Cricket Communications, sold what it called “comfortable wireless”: a flat monthly rate for unlimited local calls, aimed at people who used a mobile phone close to home and might give up a landline for it. The flat rate meant customers did not have to watch their minutes and the company did not have to track them.

The service went live in March 1999 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Leap had picked up the wireless licence for the city earlier that year by buying Chase Telecommunications Holdings, the Directory says, along with licences for Nashville, Memphis and Knoxville and neighbouring territory. English Wikipedia, citing a 2019 company press release, describes Chattanooga as Cricket’s opening market and says that through much of its early growth the brand became known for small and rural markets. Leap made an initial public offering in 2000.

The Directory records that Leap filed for Chapter 11 protection in April 2003, and the Union-Tribune reported in 2009 that the company emerged from bankruptcy in 2004. After the reorganisation the Directory says Leap began offering prepaid plans, text messaging and trial data services such as ring tones, wallpapers and games alongside the original flat-rate calling.

New cities, then a new owner.

After the reorganisation Cricket moved into larger cities. The Union-Tribune, writing in April 2009 as Leap marked the brand’s tenth anniversary, listed Phoenix in 2001, then Houston, Las Vegas and St. Louis, with San Diego following in late 2006 and Chicago and Philadelphia in 2009. The paper described the Chicago launch as a piece of street theatre built around an oversized replica of a Samsung phone, and noted that the Philadelphia launch was met by billboard trucks sent by a rival prepaid brand.

In July 2013, English Wikipedia says, AT&T agreed to buy Cricket. The Verge reported on 13 March 2014 that the Federal Communications Commission had approved AT&T’s purchase of Leap Wireless, and AT&T has owned Cricket since 2014. AT&T already ran a prepaid brand of its own, Aio Wireless, launched the year before. Android Police reported on 14 March 2014 that AT&T would shut Aio down and combine the assets of both under the Cricket name.

The merged business was presented as the “new” Cricket. CNET reported on 14 May 2014 that Aio was being folded into Cricket and that Jennifer Van Buskirk would lead the combined brand as president. FierceWireless added on 18 May 2014 that Van Buskirk had previously headed Aio, and that she presented the relaunch to reporters at a Cricket concept store in a suburb of Atlanta. Aio stores were being converted into Cricket stores, the trade paper said, and iMore reported that every Aio and Cricket store would carry the Cricket brand after a floor-to-ceiling redesign.

Behind the shop fronts the service itself changed. English Wikipedia says Cricket began shutting its own CDMA network in March 2015, completed the shutdown that September and moved customers to AT&T’s GSM network. Wikipedia gives the company’s headquarters today as Atlanta, Georgia.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all wireless carriers, and a carrier’s identity reaches people through a handful of familiar places: the shop front on a high street or in a strip mall, the small card that holds a SIM, the screen of a phone during setup, and the advertising that runs on television, billboards and social feeds. Unlike a packaged product, a carrier sells a service that cannot be seen, so the name, the logo and the colour do much of the work of making it recognisable.

Colour is often the first thing a carrier tries to own. A single strong hue can be repeated across signage, uniforms, packaging and digital screens until it reads as the brand on its own. Typography plays a supporting part, setting the tone of headlines and offers in advertising and keeping store signage legible from a distance.

Carrier brands also change hands. A name can pass between owners, be kept as a separate label after a merger or be retired altogether, so each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its look has changed along the way.

One name kept, one look rebuilt.

The 2014 relaunch is where Cricket’s visual history is set out in the trade press. English Wikipedia carries two logo files, one marked as the mark used before the AT&T acquisition and one dated 2014. MediaPost’s Marketing Daily reported on 19 May 2014 that the relaunch brought a new creative style, a new tagline and a redesigned logo, and described the new mark as highlighting the upward trajectory of the line in the letter “k” in the middle of the word. The advocacy site Stop the Cap! noted on 20 May 2014 that Cricket had relaunched its website with the new logo, and that AT&T kept its own name off the combined site.

The advertising set the tone. MediaPost said the launch commercial used animated blobs with arms and legs, cavorting in a cityscape, and ended with a group of the characters smiling over the tagline “Something to Smile About.” Van Buskirk told the publication, “We’re keeping the Cricket name, but we’re changing the game,” and described the intended customer as a “seeker of smart,” someone who wants to make a sensible choice about a phone and a plan.

The stores carried the same idea into physical space. FierceWireless described the new retail look as an open and simple design with bright green signage, smartphones grouped by operating system with accessories hanging below, and a “Kids Play” area, and observed that the new Cricket closely resembled Aio Wireless. FierceWireless also reported that Cricket planned to open new stores in markets where the brand had not existed before.

For a design guide, Cricket Wireless shows how a brand name can survive a change of owner while nearly everything around it is rebuilt: a reworked logo, a new tagline, animated advertising and a store format carried over from a sister brand. Compare it with its parent, AT&T, and with Verizon. For this guide we use signage green, ink black and store white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cricket Wireless’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.