Jason Egnal, Chief Marketing Officer at Zenfolio, talked about their new logo and font type, what he would have done differently in their rebranding process, and “The Bigger Picture”.

Can you introduce us to Zenfolio, its beginnings, and what it’s about?

Zenfolio was launched in 2006 for those passionate about photography and who wanted an end-to-end solution for marketing, portfolio presentation, client galleries, and selling photos.

Over the last two years, Zenfolio has been rebuilding its 15-year-old solution, improving the backbone of the Classic product to enhance stability, performance and security, while in parallel, building a brand new user experience on a new, cutting-edge platform.

Our new solution caters to the needs of all photographers, from aspiring photographers to part-time and full-time professionals. 

Today, Zenfolio is mobile-first, has built-in social features, and AI capabilities. We help photographers be more productive by automating every aspect of their business so they can grow efficiently.

You’ve updated your technology and systems. Why also do a rebranding on top of that?

When we analyzed the market, the competitive landscape, how the photography industry had evolved, and the new, highly differentiated product we were about to launch, we saw an opportunity to redefine ourselves as not only an established, reliable player, but as a fresh company with new management, new technology and inspired new ideas. 

A company with the credibility and passion to help photographers succeed in doing what they love.

There are many reasons to rebrand: Changes to the product offering, shifts in customer behaviour, targeting a new audience.

There was also the boom of the gig economy, shifts in the political environment, and of course the COVID pandemic. It’s become more important than ever for a brand to have a voice. 

We needed to find our voice, our brand, our positioning, to define who we are in the modern era.

All of these reasons provided a very strong argument for saying, "Look, the company has been reinvented and the world has changed. We can't just do a brand refresh, we need to completely reimagine the brand."

How did the process of rebranding go? What kind of prep work did you do before rebranding?

We decided to work with a branding agency because we didn't have the bandwidth internally as our marketing team was working with our existing product to find creative ways to help our photographers generate revenue during COVID.

We did extensive research into the positioning, messaging, and voice of our competitors. We also looked at successful brands in the SaaS space and in the consumer space, and at social media brands.

We wanted to create a brand that was dynamic and fresh and would resonate with photographers of all levels of experience across multiple photography genres.

When creating the logo, we were looking for something that represented photography, but didn't want something as obvious as a camera. 

We wanted it to be indicative of different elements of photography, things that are recognizable to photographers, but also represent the changing photography industry, the flexibility of the digital format, the increasing importance of video, and new revenue opportunities for digital art.

Tell us more about your new logo. What is the significance of the rings?

The circles are meant to be interpretive. They can allude to lenses, or represent f-stop, aperture, and focus. They are not perfectly aligned, as if their movement is frozen in an unexpected moment, indicating the dynamism of photography.

We decided to not be too prescriptive about the color of the rings, indicating flexibility and willingness to embrace change. We can use seasonal colors, or event-based colors.

For example, during Pride Week, we used the logo to indicate the importance of diversity and inclusion. We also spent time on how much transparency there should be on the different colored rings so that they showed through to highlight their asymmetrical and unusual placement, showing movement and energy.

We decided to go for magenta, appealing to our growing audience of young, aspiring photographers. The blue is powerful and universal, and we kept the orange as a reference to our original brand.

We've got 15 years of experience, we know what our customers need, we’re a successful company, we're profitable. We're looking to the future, but our history is important. The orange is a tribute to our successful past.

What about changes to the font type and other parts of the visual identity?

You may notice that there are some unusual elements in the font type. For example, you’ll see that the vertical line on the ‘F’ is longer than the vertical line of the ‘L’. The tittle on the ‘i’ is a little higher than it should be. It doesn’t fit. It takes your eye up and forward — a positive movement.

The unusual elements create dissonance, making the logo more interesting and more engaging. Not conforming to a standard helps us with our brand positioning. It’s unusual. It’s unexpected. It indicates that Zenfolio is a home for the creative and artistic.

One of the frustrations that the creative team had with our old brand was that the logo was just a word in a standard font, and the color palette was orange, gray, and navy. They were limited in their creative output, and our collateral was not as inspiring as it needed to be.

We needed the brand to be flexible, to have a larger color palette that appealed to all of our user-personas, ranging from young, social-savvy 25 to 35-year-old aspiring photographers to older, more established professional photographers (who are just as social savvy and creative). 

We also want to connect with the professional studio photographer who is running a business with a team of photographers. So the rebrand needed to have broad appeal.

Your tagline is ‘The Bigger Picture’. Why did you choose that slogan?

The tagline is an important one. We had many in mind, but this one was the most inspiring, was liked immediately by everybody, and perfectly tied to our mission.

A huge piece of what differentiates Zenfolio from our competitors is that we automate photographers’ business processes using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Our AI platform acts like a digital assistant working behind the scenes while photographers work behind the lens, making them more efficient and helping them earn more.

Zenfolio is more than just a technology partner for photographers. It’s their customer support, their admin helping them run a business, and even advising them. It’s their marketing and sales team. 

Zenfolio is an end-to-end solution helping our photographers’ businesses become bigger and better. It's the bigger picture.

Could you share with us a takeaway or learning from this entire experience?

I started the rebranding maybe a month after joining Zenfolio. The company was not expecting a complete rebrand, so we had to do it in three months from start to finish in order to be ready for the launch of the new product. That was a very compressed timeline.

I think we came up with a beautiful design that is very meaningful, but the short timeline put pressure on the team.

The biggest lesson: Energy and passion is not enough - give a rebranding initiative the time it deserves.

If we’d started sooner, the brand would have been established before we started product design, making it much easier to create brand consistency through every touchpoint.

Incorporating the original orange in the new brand provided compatibility with both the Classic product and the new product. That made things a bit easier. 

But branding is not only about the visuals, right? Finding the right tone and voice defines the brand, tells its story, and gives it life. We put a lot of energy into creating the right voice. 

In a perfect world, I would have rolled out the rebrand globally all at once. As time was not on our side we had to make compromises and trickle the rebrand out. 

If I had to redo this experience, I would've preferred to launch the brand with a bang, not a whimper.

We have a very agile development team, so every two weeks, we’re adding and launching new features. We're also focusing on our Future of Photography initiative to support photography students by giving away over $1,000,000 worth of subscriptions to our Portfolio plan. 

We help photographers showcase their work, delight their clients and make their passion for photography a viable business. Our new platform is fresh and exciting, and although the company has been around for over a decade, this is just the beginning.

Discover the story behind Zenfolio's latest rebrand.

Shachar Aylon, Executive Creative Director at Picsart, talked about the importance of strategy, the value of having a well-defined brand persona, and working with different companies to focus on different aspects of the rebrand.

Can you tell us the story behind Picsart’s rebranding?

Over the year, Picsart has evolved from an app to a design platform. If you think about what users did with Picsart in the past, it was mostly self-expression — filters, stickers, brushes, selfies — things that helped a whole generation find a creative outlet, in ways they couldn't have in the past.

So that begs the question, can we extend that offering to go beyond just self expression? When we look at the landscape today, especially with COVID, we see opportunities to help people with design well beyond just personal use.

If we think about this new emerging economy — the creator economy — there is a lot of need for design out there that is not being met.

There are now all these platforms to help people start their own businesses online, and this is an opportunity for us to help them promote themselves with better design.

Were there any specific events that prompted this rebrand? Was it all smooth or were there pitfalls?

Before joining Picsart, during the interview process, I was surprised to discover that it has 150 million active users, 1 billion downloads, and consistently ranks at the top 20 free apps in the app store. Those are major signals that there’s already the right kind of attention, and that people really love the platform.

What was missing is that brand recognition. Picsart is not a household name or the app you immediately go to when you think about creating something . So I joined Picsart with that intention and challenge in mind.

How do we take an already great product with a huge user base and make it even more well-known and accessible, not only for Gen Z, but beyond that?

What was very clear to me when I joined is that before we even talk about a rebrand, before we even touch the design itself, we need to know what we want to say, how we want to position the company, and how we want to achieve that. So essentially, strategy and brand positioning. Aka brief.

We spent three months in the beginning just identifying what our strong suit was, and how we wanted to stand out among the competition.

Where can we win in the market, how we want to position the company, etc. So those were some of the initial conversations that made the process pretty smooth internally.

Being aligned on our positioning, and where we want to go as a company also simplified our collaboration with external stakeholders.

Can you share with us the reason behind the change in your wordmark?

Changing a capital ‘A’ to a small ‘a’ may look like a small change, but for us, it is a big deal. It’s not only the name of the company, but symbolically it represents a new stage of Picsart.

As a platform, we have gone way beyond just pictures and self-expression. We wanted to focus on the general idea of Picsart which is a design platform that allows you to design in a way that is easy and fun rather than only focus on ‘picture’ and ‘art’.

We wanted people to think about us as one idea rather than two separate thoughts or services.

What about your brand persona? How did you land on the archetype of the ‘rebel art teacher’?

Once we knew the strategy, and we started thinking about the visual identity of the brand, we knew immediately that the voice or how we come across in writing is just as important. We wanted to give that attention so we started working with Hermit, who helped us with the tone of voice.

As I mentioned in our blog post, the brand persona is a reflection of the personality, and type of person you'd like the brand to embody. This embodiment reflects in every touchpoint from our copy to our images and reflects how we come across.

Picsart's brand persona embodies the archetype of the "rebel art teacher"

We actually explored five different personas, and finally landed on one that we dubbed as the rebel art teacher. It felt like a perfect fit because we're trying to encourage a whole generation of people to take on a new skill, and we'd like to give them the confidence to design.

If I'm going back to our strategy and thinking about what we're trying to offer people, it's that idea that anybody can design, so the archetype of the rebel art teacher that gave you the confidence to try new things felt natural.

We wanted that voice to be the anchor to our visual identity. If the visuals are expressive and pop-y and colorful and vibrant, we wanted a confident voice that pushed you to try new things, take on a new challenge, and maybe step beyond your comfort zone.

So I think the archetype of the rebel art teacher embodied that idea.

How did you choose Picsart’s new typography?

On a more conceptual level, we know that type has personality. Beyond what words we choose to use, what typeface we choose also emits a personality. So we explored a few typefaces during the early stages of the rebranding.

We landed on a typeface called Gilroy that represents that roundness, that kind of friendliness that the rebel art teacher has.

So that relationship between the tone of voice and the typeface needs to be a strong one. Sans Serif or Serif, cursive or big chunky letters? They all have their own personality. Knowing how you want to write, the tone, and what their relationship is with the typeface you choose is important.

What we also discovered throughout the process is that what might work very well in some channels like blogs, emails, advertising, might not work as well on small digital screens.

We had to think about all the different types of use cases for a typeface. And knowing that it can translate to multiple languages, work on different devices, different printing techniques, or different displays was important. 

So beyond just the design aesthetic, there are a lot of technical aspects that you need to make sure that you vet before you invest in a typeface.

A big part of your new visual identity is your brand photography. How was this conceptualized?

What I loved about working with New Company and Jacq Harriet for photography is that it made us evaluate the function of brand photography when it comes to a design platform like Picsart.

Often, I've worked on brands or companies where brand photography is just people using the product. But here, photography is almost like our canvas, rather than starting with a blank white square.

"Photography is like our canvas, rather than starting a design with a blank white square."

When I think about our users, their starting point is actually photography. Maybe it’s a selfie, maybe it’s a photo of their product. But it usually starts with a photo. So we knew that we needed to reimagine what our version of stock photography is.

We wanted something that represented our user base and our type of expression, whether it's for your business, or for your self-expression, or for your personal use. We wanted to make sure that it came across as a strong visual identity of the brand.

So we basically created our own version of a brand stock library, where we shot it all on white backgrounds, with the intention for designers to remix it into their own thing.

"We needed to reimagine what our version of stock photography is."

So that ability to reinterpret images feels like a perfect representation of our community because that's exactly what they do. They take one image, remix it, and then put it out into the community to be reinterpreted again.

You also make use of frames in this rebranding. Can you tell us more about this?

When I think about Picsart and what's great about our user community, they pretty much create every type of design out there: from fancy black and white photography to frenetic and expressive collage art. There’s every type of design on the platform.

So that’s a unique design challenge for us. Because how do we hero these designs? How do we give a platform for all of these types of designs while keeping them consistent?

I want to make sure that when we put out an ad or do something that is branded, that people immediately have that moment that they’re like, “I know that’s Picsart!”

So our idea was that of a frame. It’s the same thing as in art museums and galleries. They have so many different types of arts, from oil paintings to digital photography and they still manage to keep it consistent.

Around every image, every composition that we showcase or hero, and with our branding and advertising, we surround it with colors that are complementary, that is taken from the image itself. This basically adds a consistent element that is still variable to that image and creates a nice relationship between the brand and the composition we’re highlighting.

Finally, do you have any advice for designers who are embarking on rebranding projects?

I would say that before you even touch the visual frameworks, before you even do your logo or design, think about your positioning and your strategy. How do you want to come across to the world? That’s what we asked ourselves internally.

Strategy is so important to get that end result in a smooth way without too much back and forth.

I think without knowing your goals or what you want to accomplish, it can potentially create chaos for you or any potential designer that might be working on the rebrand.

"You need to know what you want to do first, and then execute."

So I would just stress the importance of thinking upfront about what you want to accomplish.

If you think about the job of designers, you never jump into a finished composition. You always start with thumbnails. You start with different ideas, sketches, and then you identify the right solution.

Discover the story behind Picsart's latest rebrand.

Nic Brandenberger, VP of Consumer Marketing at Fandom, talked about how they built a task force from various departments to help with the rebranding, the stories behind their new logo and slogan, and the vocal response to the changes from their engaged community.

What prompted Fandom’s rebranding? When and how did the conversation start?

The idea of a rebranding became tangible and compelling in 2020, when the team saw a number of elements converging toward a unique, consumer-noticeable change in Fandom's brand experience: we’ve decided to migrate our Gamepedia wikis into the Fandom domain. 

At the same time, we’ve planned for a significant refresh of the Fandom product experience and also kicked off a major initiative to drive more engagement amongst our 315 million monthly unique visitors. 

There was no way we could pass on this opportunity to modernize Fandom’s brand expression, and support all of these initiatives with an additional, strong signal for creators, fans and employees. The stars only very rarely align in such a way that a brand can genuinely claim that it’s “all-new”, but they did for us.

We’ve had a great starting point in that our company’s vision and mission was clear. With that clarity in mind, we’ve focused first on refining our brand positioning as well as our core brand propositions for creators and fans.

We conducted quantitative research into our target audiences’ needs, wants and barriers, and — in combination with regular brand health surveys — were able to synthesize critical insights to form a brand strategy framework.

While staying true to existing brand attributes and traits, we then started to translate the core strategic tenets into key branded assets, including logo, colors, typography, patterns, and more.

“We translated our core strategic tenets into key brand assets, including logo, colors, typography, patterns, and more.”

Moving away from familiar brand building blocks is always painful, and can often create various forms of resistance at first. Especially given that Fandom is a young company, with a diverse employee base, and operating in aggressive growth mode, the company made a conscious choice to involve the broader employee population from the early stages of brand identity work. 

A multifunctional brand task force, composed of leaders from the community, product, content, design, marketing, and sales organizations, was formed to ensure a transparent and engaged brand redesign process and relevant representation for decision-making. 

They regularly shared progress and even conducted surveys amongst employees to bring them along on the journey, hear their aspirations and hopes for the brand, but also take note of concerns and doubts about specific elements of the re-branding efforts.

We’re extremely blessed to have an amazingly talented in-house design team, enabling Fandom to deliver the entire rebranding effort, including distinctive assets, documentation and guidelines, internal and external design templates, operational assets, brand swag boxes, and even fit-for-use marketing executions — all within just a few months!

Can you share the story behind your new logo?

The new Fandom logo needed to fit with our new strategy, authentically reflect the soul and history of our brand, while modernizing and differentiating our brand, and provide a flexible platform for Fandom to communicate with its audiences. 

We started exploring a wide range of options before converging on a manageable number of logo routes, from simple but playful variations of letterforms, to visualizations of wayfinding and navigation, concepts of discovery and exploration, as well as ideas around passion.

A somewhat subconscious decision in favor of our new logo “Fire & Passion” was actually taken surprisingly early on, and then rationalized and formalized over time through a diligent process of refinement, experimentation, and elimination:

Fire & Passion delivers against all the evaluation criteria, but is also strikingly intuitive and easy to understand. 

It feels celebratory and authentic to our brand’s mission, reflects the passion of fandom experienced by our fans and creators every day, and it pays tribute to the history of our brand in obvious and less obvious ways. Ultimately, it was easy for the brand task force to get excited about what this logo could do for the brand, and stand firmly behind the logo choice.  

And notably, all this was done in-house without the help of an agency.

Can you tell us more about the conceptualization of your slogan?

“For the love of fans” not only captures the brand’s positioning as a platform that powers people’s fandoms, but also puts in words what the logo design implies, and ultimately why most Fandom employees get out of bed every morning and out to work. This brand is truly built for fans, by fans.

An important criteria for our brand tagline was how well it could flex for various fandoms and fans. As the world’s largest fan platform with over 250,000 wikis serving hundreds of millions of fans, we understand and cherish the diversity of fandoms and people in our communities.

“For the love of fans” is made to be hijacked by our fans and creators.

We will use it, as a brand, to communicate the breadth and depth of fandoms on our platform, but it can just as easily be adapted to fit an individual’s passions. 

We hope to enable our fans and creators to play around with it and get wild!

Do you have any advice for others thinking of rebranding to improve brand awareness?

Our rebranding efforts focus on supporting the stronger visibility of Fandom as a platform provider across devices, while still leaving the majority of platform real estate to content providers which create the wiki pages. 

We’ve leveraged new brand colors to accentuate the Fandom global navigation, attract attention and eyeballs to the broader offering of Fandom, drive cross-wiki visitation, and ultimately generate a rising tide that lifts all boats.

A rebranding effort can help significantly amplify broader and deeper evolutions of the end-to-end customer experience. But to drive awareness, different brands may need to activate different levers in different ways, depending on how the product can be effectively communicated to, as well as experienced and shared by respective audiences. 

General advice for developing awareness-driving strategies would be to intimately understand usage occasions for the brand (why, in which context, and when are people using it?), and usage behaviors and patterns (how--long, often, deeply etc.--are they using the brand?) and then deliver coherently and consistently against these motivations and behaviors across the customer journey touchpoints. 

If you can spend media dollars, use them when and where the audience will be most receptive to the messaging.

How would you say is diversity manifested in Fandom’s new look?

We connect with our community frequently and deeply, and we are consistently in awe of the diversity of people, perspectives, and ideas amongst our fans and creators. It is the driving force behind the sheer breadth of fandoms on our platform, and the richness and depth of the content within each of them.

Diversity is not just something we’re passionate about. It’s in the DNA of the experience.

Our total brand experience reflects diversity through the people on our site and the breadth and depth of content they generate and consume. This is why our efforts around diversity go way beyond brand strategy and identity, and also encompass efforts to drive discoverability of fandoms, search, navigation, engagement with content, and promotion of our communities.

“Our mission is to build a place of joy without judgement, where you belong, simply because you’re a fan.”

We are laser-focused on enabling our fans and creators to create incredible content, and share it with the world. If our brand redesign effort can add a tiny bit of value with a modular tagline or a customizable avatar (coming soon!), then we are the happiest of all campers!

How has the reception to the rebrand been like?

Fandom has indeed several audience segments which are heavily involved, spend significant amounts of time in the experience, and are highly passionate about their fandoms. The most engaged segments will naturally perceive any changes to their experience more immediately and more acutely than others, and also be more vocal about it.

Brand logos (and colors, in particular) are often difficult to assess in a criteria-based way, leaving room for subjective judgement and preferences, making it objectively difficult to please everyone. As expected, we saw a few comments on our staff blog post on the rebrand, expressing dislikes over some color choices. 

Yet, in our most recent “Community Connect” event, a forum for the platform's top creators to connect with Fandom leadership, the vast majority of our creator community expressed an overwhelmingly positive reaction to the rebrand, including color choices. 

We will continue to proactively field comments from the community, provide perspective, and moderate discussions about our brand’s evolution on Discord and other forums.

Brands need to evolve at the speed of culture, technology, and consumer behavior. Doing so becomes an imperative for success, especially for a brand like Fandom, positioning as both a reflection and a barometer of pop culture, and serving a predominantly young, dynamic, and promiscuous audience.

It may take a bit of time until everyone can find their way around the new experience and be familiarized with the new brand look and feel. 

But needless to say, we’re extremely excited about our new brand and we feel very confident in our choices around the redesign efforts, given our diligent approach including consumer surveys, multiple employees, and community involvements during the redesign process, as well as usability research studies all suggesting measurably improved experiences behind the changes. 

Discover the story behind Fandom's latest rebrand.

Vitaly Pecherskiy, Co-Founder and COO of StackAdapt, talked about saying goodbye to their startup days, how large companies choose a new logo, and why they focus on speed for their video campaign.

Can you  introduce us to StackAdapt, your mission, and the early days of your brand?

The three of us, Ildar Shar, Yang Han, and myself, co-founded StackAdapt in 2014.  

Prior to launching the company, Ildar and I worked at an agency so we saw a clear need for a next-generation advertising platform. Once we met Yang, who just moved to Toronto from New York where he was building financial trading platforms, we knew we had a great team to see if we could get a minimum viable product to market. 

We felt that we could offer a better platform that would use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) at its core, would be intuitive to operate, and be built around delivering results to advertisers.

To launch a website we needed a logo, so Yang simply typed it out and used a color accent to emphasize the word “ad” within our name.

It was symbolic of our scrappiness as a startup, we didn’t care much about these details, but we were passionate about technology and solving client problems, so we threw ourselves into that from day one.

What prompted your rebranding? When did you and your team start thinking of rebranding StackAdapt?

We were one of the companies that were fortunate to benefit from changes in consumer behaviour during the pandemic, and we saw explosive growth in the past 18 months.  

Earlier this year, we crossed the 350-person mark and it was apparent that we had some bottlenecks in branding that were limiting us from making a larger impact on the market and the logo was one of those things. We needed a logo that would give us more flexibility as we continue scaling our organization. We felt the time was right to refresh our brand. 

"We felt the time was right to refresh our brand." - Vitaly Pecherskiy, Co-Founder and COO of StackAdapt

We are very proud that all of the work on the new logo was done internally as we have a really talented team who brought many great ideas to the table. When we rolled out the new logo at a virtual company meeting, you should’ve seen Slack light up with all the excitement and positive comments.

It was really emotional for me because I felt I was saying goodbye to the startup days.

What I didn’t realize at the time was how excited I am to enter the growth phase of our company. Now, looking at our new branding and logo, I can’t imagine it any other way. 

How did the process go? Were there any pitfalls or problems that you encountered?

The process was pretty smooth, but very quickly turned into a fork in the road between a new typeface for the existing logo or a more dramatic and modern design. We fully developed both paths before choosing the final version.  

Our internal teams presented 40 options that dramatically modernized our brand--from the exotic to fresh, but practical options. The challenging part was whether we should go with a bigger change or stay closer to what we had originally.  

Within the marketing team, we narrowed it down from 40 to 20 concepts. The team tested them against the various challenges we faced in the past with our old logo, and narrowed the choices to two options before presenting to the executive team. The first option was an adaptation of our old logo, but with a unique and visually balanced logotype. The second option was a fresh design that combined elements of what made our brand recognizable, but with a new icon.  

Our executives chose the brand new approach, which was forward-looking and provided the flexibility we needed to continue evolving our brand, all while showcasing elements that made us successful in the first place.  

As I mentioned, our team loved it immediately. Many asked that day how they could get apparel or merchandise with the new logo, and the feedback from our key external stakeholders has been the same. Everyone wants some fresh swag with the new logo on it!

Are there any significant learnings or takeaways from this major rebranding?

Your audience will probably not be surprised that it took us a few phases to land us on the final design.  

We knew we wanted to create a logo that would represent StackAdapt as the bigger organization that we have become. A brand that provides a comprehensive solution to help all who seek to innovate in digital marketing from individual media buyers to the larger agency or the in-house marketing organization of a large brand. A brand that delivers results.

Some brands have a history of making dramatic changes to their logo. While it works for some, I would not recommend this to everyone. I think there is a fine line to be walked here. Yes, it’s good to continue evolving your brand to stay relevant, but it’s important to answer the question of “why?” when you want to do dramatic rebrands and logo redesigns.  

Too many organizations fall back on their brand as the reason for any slowed growth. As a result, they burn a lot of resources trying to market themselves better, while instead they should perhaps spend more time with their customers to understand their evolving needs, over-invest in their product, or level-up their team.  

I am happy with the way our brand journey unfolded because it was never about trying to ignite growth: it was to keep up with our growth. 

Can you tell us more about your video campaign, “Speed that makes the difference?”

An excellent, strategic agency partner, Atreo, led us through a process to assess potential positions that StackAdapt could occupy based on our unique abilities overlaid on what our customers care about the most. That’s how we landed on the concept of speed.

A programmatic platform not only has to deliver great results, but also needs to be intuitive and easy to use while allowing an experienced user to get to a properly prepared campaign in just a few minutes. The StackAdapt platform is very focused on user experience and continually adding capabilities that allow our customers to do more and do it faster.  

That’s why StackAdapt has earned the highest customer satisfaction scores on G2 for 5 consecutive years. We deliver exceptional performance while focusing on the experience that maximizes the productivity of the media team.

What has been the reception to your rebranding so far?

Everyone wanted swag with the new logo on it!

It’s hard to imagine that we didn’t have this brand all along. It feels very fitting and natural. I haven’t heard a single person comment that they wish we had kept the old logo. Our customers have given us dozens of unsolicited positive comments too, which is always appreciated.  

There is always a lot going on at StackAdapt because we just never slow down building our platform. 

Two advertising channels that I am most excited about are connected TV and programmatic audio. We see a big demand from advertisers because StackAdapt democratizes those channels and makes it very easy to run advertising the same way only the world’s largest brands could do just a few years ago. 

Lastly, we are doubling down on our patent-pending Page Context AI technology for contextual advertising. We are seeing big demand from advertisers looking to target users in the moment when they research their or their competitor’s products, and we are seeing some really strong performance results from it-- so we’ll be busy commercializing it further!

Discover the story behind StackAdapt's latest rebrand.

Matt Yow, Designer at Census, talked to us about when the company knew it was time for a visual upgrade, his fusion of Vaporwave and Bauhaus to create a visual language, customizing typography for a ‘warmer touch’, and the importance of brand strategy.

Can you introduce us to Census and its initial branding?

I had to learn quite a lot about the data nomenclature and data culture when onboarding. My background is purely design, so it was a learning curve to simply understand the business as well as the industry. 

Census is an operational analytics platform, a final piece in the modern data stack. Basically, it’s a vein or highway taking large datasets from warehouses and properly syncing it seamlessly across other CMS platforms. 

This is a new space so we knew we wanted some kind of splash with the rebrand, but not alienating those unfamiliar with design concepts.

How did you know that Census had outgrown its previous brand identity, and that it was time for a rebrand?

The initial visual identity of Census was the exclusive use of Lato (an open-source Google Font) and a less-than-accessible yellow. There was nothing distinct or memorable about the system.

We had outgrown the identity right when I started: new hires, new customers, new discussion around the growing terms of “modern data stack,” “operational analytics,” and “reverse ETL.” We began leading in this space and needed a visual upgrade to our market footprint.

There was never any pushback or apprehension on the rebrand. We have an incredibly supportive team and a successful redesign was always a priority.

What was the rebranding process like for your team? Who did you work with?

This project was led by myself with support from my manager, a copywriter, and some other marketing (non-design) roles. But for the most part, for better or worse, this was on my shoulders.

I think there was a lot of patience in me learning this industry while also building design systems: what made sense versus what was out of line for the common data analyst. 

You used archetypes to guide you in this rebranding. What went into finding this for Census?

If I was never a designer, I would have been a brand strategist. From this perspective, I’ve always loved the verbal side of identity design. I mentioned it in our blog post, but resources came from The Hero and the Outlaw by Carol Pearson and Margaret Mark. Their work is informed by psychologist Carl Jung and anthropologist Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces). 

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