In 2019, I reached out to LaunchDarkly for an open Senior Brand Designer role. Ghosted. No one ever replied to my email. Just a year later (2020), I was working at Focus Lab and a client rolled into their qualified leads funnel. It was LaunchDarkly needing an end-to-end rebrand. Enter: me.
LaunchDarkly brand reveal
LaunchDarkly was great to work with: Keith Messik, SVP Marketing and Dustin Haver, Head of Design were fantastic partners in bringing the new identity to life.
Before/After
Logo construction
We wanted core brand attributes beyond the mundane “Modern, Approachable, and Trusted.” Leaning into tougher questions and better conversation led to a set of much richer brand attributes: The Reliable Maverick, Assured & Bright, and Boast-worthy — truly attributes the LaunchDarkly brand exhibits from the inside out.
The visual language grew from a place of outer space: being grayscale but allowing occasional blips of color. Photography was intended to be halftone to amplify a brand rooted in futurism while allowing for other visual elements to balance a tempered nostalgia. We used halftone patterns, open source imagery of planets and stars, and primary shapes (set in unique brand colors) to establish an iconic visual ecosystem.
Halftone photo styling
Color system
What a joy to pair Audimat 3000 (by Jack Usine) with Söhne (by Klim). Their partnership plays an essential part of the identity. It allows LaunchDarkly to be boast-worthy while remaining reliable and assured. The typographic system relies on Audimat 3000, a versatile font with a subtle blend of rigidity and eccentricity. Söhne is much more no-nonsense with it’s DNA in Akzidenz-Grotesk — making it a suitable option for most longer-form text, where Audimat simply catches the eye.
