Solace Brand Refresh

Reinventing a tech brand for the future

Role: Creative Director (Art)

How do you make an aging B2B software company stand out to a market increasingly defined by younger in-house developers? Make it feel like it doesn’t belong in its category at all. To get there, we went back to basics, retooling Solace’s brand strategy, leading to a full rebrand. What we ended up delivering was a bold new visual identity and tone of voice for the brand, which went on to inform an award-winning campaign.

Rehash the brand strategy

To reinvent the Solace, we worked with stakeholders at all levels of the company to determine the essence of the company. This lead to a newly clarified Brand Story that included the Mission, Audience, and Values.

Define a bold brand personality

We needed to tell Solace’s brand story with a personality that matched its bold mission and values and would resonate with the target audience. Our solution was “The Witty Expert.”

Type and color choices that stand apart from the competition

When they zig, we zag. Our competitive audit showed that B2B software category was saturated with tired tech design clichés. Instead of following the pack, we would own an innovative shade of green and an unexpected serif font that would visually align us more with modern brands in other categories.

A bold and playful logo

Our brand personality and bold aesthetic choices culminate in our logo design. The Solace wordmark, rendered in a bold serif font, is punctuated by “The Ping” — a visual abstraction of a computer networking concept. The Ping is designed not to simply read as a period, but rather become an animated element that can move, repeat, and tell visual stories in playful ways, further reinforcing the themes of data and movement.