designs x kass

designs x kass

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Rebranding a Category Leader

Challenge

Neo4j as a brand, lacked a point of view. It was blending in with its competitors, and wasn’t allowing it to show up as the category leader it was.

Solution

We launched a complete brand redesign that included a custom typeface, a new color palette, brand shapes, and thoughtful photography to better reflect the company’s position in the market. We conducted interviews, workshops, and a thorough competitive audit to establish the brand’s strategy and personality.

Neo4j was the category leader but it didn’t look that way. It was getting lost in tech tropes and an indistinguishable color palette.

A nature-inspired color-palette
Our primary color, combines the calmness of blue with the refreshing qualities of green. It has a balance of both cool and warm undertones, making it a versatile color that can evoke different moods depending on its context. It is inspired by the Baltic sea—paying homage to Neo4j’s Swedish roots. To compliment Baltic, our shades of green, red, and orange are inspired by other elements of nature.

Node shapes
Nodes and connections are core to the Neo4j brand. They visualize the product itself, and how different data points come together. They were looking for a node shape that felt more fluid, organic, and could be used in a wide range of marketing assets. We explored a number of potential approaches, and landed in the shape system below. We established a consisted hexagonal grid, and created a range of node shapes. We also established patterns and combinations of nodes so the team would have a consistent set of shapes to draw from.

We established rules around how and when to use node shapes, including color and scale combinations, motion, and application with photography.

We introduced nature photography into the brand system, along with photos with an emphasis in connections. We prioritized natural lighting and  patterns in compositions.

We fell in love with ‘Syne’ a Google font, but found it had limitations and was clashing with core brand principles. We worked with its designer to create a custom version of the typeface– ‘Syne Neo’ to better suit our needs.

We wanted our node shapes to be reflected in the typeface. The original ‘Syne’ had squares in the periods, quotations, and tittles. We wanted them to be circular. We also wanted the roundness of nodes to come through in j’s descender. The last adjustment we made was in the numerals. They were defaulted to Oldstyle alignment, but we needed them to better mirror the Neo4j logo and sit on the baseline.

We chose ‘Syne’ because we fell in love with the roundness of the typeface, it echoed and paired nicely with the curvature in our node shapes. We also loved the g’s descender– the organic nature of its curves, and how it felt as if it were in process of forming a connection.

We knew ‘Syne Neo’ would act as our display face, so it was important to select a workhorse pairing. We chose Public Sans. Its more narrow structure created a lot of space for legibility and provided a nice contrast to Syne.

Creating a robust set of guidelines was key to establish consistency and quality. As a global company, Neo4j has teams and vendors all over. Our 100+ page document was detailed, provided examples, templates, and common mistakes.

To help them, we broke down the anatomy of a prompt, and created a formula to generate consistency.

We knew that it was important to define an illustration style that felt unique to Neo4j and could easily be generated. We also needed to figure out a way to prompt the right colors to garner consistency there.

We started by conducting a workshop to define the style. Once we had that, we gathered data around the types of prompts used to generate the desired outcome, and then we were able to create a repeatable formula for the tem to follow.

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