Introduction

Project Overview

CloudBees hit 2019 strong with 2 company acquisitions and significant product announcements (partnership with Google for a CI/CD platform, for example). With a clear expectation in growth and a reshuffle of products, product marketing, and general customer perception, leadership identified the need to consider a corporate rebrand.

Technically this rebranding effort began in November of 2018, thinking it would be a quick 3-month project to reposition various aspects of our portfolio. However, once our brand consultant and her design team dug in, it was clear that this was going to be a heavy lift. This case study covers the work I helped with.

Problem Statement

CloudBees had grown from 5 products to almost 9 with another 3 combinations quickly approaching the marketing cycle. We were having a hard time keeping products looking like members of a suite as each product team had logos that started replacing the CloudBees mark and identity first in internal presentations, then in customer presentations, and finally on the website. It was becoming difficult to tell if "Core" was a product or a company in partnership with CloudBees, even though internal strategies were clear that "CloudBees Core" was a product under the CloudBees brand.

In less than a year, we quickly became many brands loosely relating to each other by tacking on "CloudBees" (Atlassian's old strategy), rather than appearing to our customers and the marketplace as a single brand supporting a suite of products.

My Role in the Project

After a few fumbles and stall outs, I was asked to sit in on a review meeting covering various identity options that were being pitched by an outside agency. I instantly saw the problem, and in a debrief meeting I pitched my case that the work to date did not speak to our customers, and had no clear archetype - we had yet to establish a clear and familiar character or situation that could help us frame the conversation we needed to have with our customers.

From that moment, I unofficially lead the branding efforts with a focus on the visual identity of the company. As well as the communication of that visual identity, taking into consideration the heaps of research and messaging. That messaging work had been completed by our brand consultant and her team. I say unofficially as no one ever said I was in charge (it wasn't needed). However, I informed, lead, mentored, and ultimately executed the critical work, which would lead the team to the final iteration of the brand's identity: the logo and its communication. I included and mentored Megan Callaghan, one of the designers on my team, who ultimately was just as essential as my role, as I felt it was important to share this experience, and I also knew I couldn't do it by myself. Together in partnership and collaboration with Rebecca “Bex” Moores, we produced one of the most complete corporate brand refreshes I have ever been apart of.

I pitched a "refreshed" logo as opposed to a totally new and divergent logo, as well as visual elements that would inform the entire year-long process. Almost instantly, we had traction with leadership and had monthly review meetings with the full executive team to include Director of Design (my direct boss), Marketing VP's, as well as our Chief Executive Officer. I lead the majority of the presentations while also sharing the spotlight with my team, I traveled to the agency (they were in Atlanta, so that was easy!). I participated in the entire process from concept and strategy to final logo execution, which was chosen and deployed, after a series of presentations to C-Suite and VP's.

Process

Understanding the User and/or Problem

Our brand consultant had written a 10 page Google Document which covered everything from how we saw ourselves to how developers perceived and felt about their work in the DevOps/Continuous-Everything domain. Developers wanted the freedom to do their jobs while the businesses that employed those developers wanted to ensure compliance and governance. For instance, a customer of ours is Adobe. When the developers who drive Photoshop wanted to add an ""art board"" feature to compete with Sketch, they may have up to 100 developers committing code. Our technology enables that developer freedom whilst also guaranteeing accessibility as well as security compliance - while not breaking industry-recognized standards of feature sets. Our corporate identity needed to instill trust while serving as a beacon of modern technology.

What I did & Why

The executive team as well as the marketing team was deep down a rabbit hole looking through many new and modern logo marks, and sub marks. While many were fresh and new, I took a hard stance that none of them spoke to who we are today, as they only seemed to focus on the bright and wonderful future. The reality of the situation was the fact that we had customers and established long-standing relationships. I felt very strongly, and sold the concept that we needed to maintain brand equity - we couldn't lose the investment in the visual identity that has brought us along for the past 6-7 years in the hopes that a ""blue water"" logo would fix all of our identity problems. I suggested, rather than a new logo, which took a real cloud and an actual bee into considerations, that we refine, progress, and leverage our current logo and identity.

Here is the presentation I gave the agency when I went “on location” to coach them. The goal was to let them know that I was not sent to teach them how to design, or to supervise them. I went to them to coach their designers and get them thinking about the bigger picture:

I helped the team identify the issues with the current logo, remove those issues, and refine what was left into a mark that could eventually stand along without a word-mark in an industry full of homogenized logos. The end result helped us to avoid appearing fickle and in crisis to our partners (Adobe, Capital One, InVision, Citrix, etc.) and showed refinement in who we are and what we stand for. A winning strategy that will carry the company forward for the next 10 years.

Unfortunately the coaching didn’t land with the agency and the next round was further from the mark than before with zero tie-in between the visuals and the business goals. I pitched my understanding of the brand work to-date in front of the executive team, and tried to reframe the conversation around overall strategy rather than selling new artwork.

This is the first presentation I gave to the entire executive team, The Director of Design, and my fellow designers. This presentation frames my idea to use the brand narrative we had crafted with the consultant. I wanted to use a word-association strategy to map CloudBees to one of the twelve key “brand archtypes”. This would let us know how the visual should feel to the customer and partner, in a “brand-refresh” context:

Detail views of my pitch on the visual identity, my suggested nomenclature and functions, and an overview of the sub-mark.

At the request of the executive team, we were asked to push things a little bit further. As a team we explored typography options. After landing on the two potential fonts “Gotham”, and “Circular Std”, I applied the fibonacci sequence (golden ratio) to help balance a layout. I factored kerning, letting, vertical and horizontal rhythm, legibility, and did what I could to anticipate how it may break in certain applications (large banners at a convention vs small embroidery on apparel, etc):

Finally, after a company wide presentation and an “all hands” slack convo (500+ people to be exact) I compiled all of the feedback, did what I could to communicate sentiment, and then we had a final presentation with the executive team. They went to the board with the recommendations we provided and they landed on Gotham as the final typeface for the CloudBees visual identity & word-mark. I will admit that I was grumpy for at least fifteen minutes as Megan snuck a Gotham version into the comps when I was personally pushing for Circular Std. However, in the end, and as all good teams should, we shook off the emotions and got to work. Here are the final artifacts:

Megan and Bex both helped with visual design, communication, and lead presentations from there. I executed on all of the logos, logo mock ups, and application studies with steady reviews and critiques from my team:

Result

Outcomes & Learnings

The "new" logo was not quite the whiz-bang jaw-dropper that executives may have wanted, but what we found was the overall perception of the logo was something people found exciting when deployed via stickers, apparel, and it made our online presence instantly feel like $1mm was invested. This logo may not win an award, but every single Bee is proud to brandish it, and our customers still recognize us and see it as an evolution towards improvement. At this level, with 50% of all Fortune 500 companies using our technology, this clearly was the correct path forward to instill trust, dependability, and recognizability in the industry CloudBees has been leading since 2013. 

What Happened Next

I personally worked hard to turn over the most complete set of artifacts I have ever produced so that the external agency could turn around a brand book, deploying the visual identity work done by my team to merge with their brand definition work. The end result is a document that informs the brand: top to bottom - solid and stable enough to set CloudBees up for the next decade of success in the DevOps marketplace.