Brand work requires both creativity and precision; it’s one part art, and one part science. Below are examples of brand and identity I’ve ideated and created.
My journey with Cribl began as a contract Creative Director; at the time they were looking to secure series B funding, and it was a race to establish an updated brand AND web presence in a short period of time leading up to investor interest.
Between rounds of funding, I took the leap and joined the company full time as their Director of Creative, Graphic, and Digital art — simultaneously making higher-level decisions about the brand AND being in the trenches, so to speak.
Flagship Offering: LogStream (Later, Cribl Stream)
Cribl began with one product on the market; the roadmap called for numerous products to be added over time, but the initial “land” motion was centered around their first product. The difficulty in branding here lies in the fact that we know there are multiple additional products in development; I always had to keep that in mind when making branding decisions around any one facet of the portfolio. How would decisions today impact decisions made tomorrow, or in a month, or in a year?
Although each product can stand on its own, the decision to brand each product as a Cribl product proved to be most successful in the market; this way, no matter how you came to interact with any software solution, it reinforced the underlying corporate promise of quality software that made the life of practitioners easier, as well as a sense of cohesion between product offerings.
Fast-forward to two years later, and I had built out a full product-centric Umbrella; the corporate branding rests on top, followed by a cascade of individual SaaS solutions; each in kind with a number of marketable features that can be talking points when selling the software to end users:
Concurrently with the brand umbrella, I developed a standard visual language by way of brand guidelines; this informs our visual “voice” and ensures consistency across the brand. Standard stuff: color pallette, iconography, typography, editorial styles, partner co-brand styles, etc.
Since Cribl also has a robust channel and partner program, I also designed and developed a Brand Asset Repository; this self-service portion of our forward-facing website enables partners to follow guidelines when building out their own co-branded assets and programs.
By establishing this hierarchical and visual baseline, we can now have a little fun with our branding applications. One of the most appreciable aspects of Cribl as a company is their values, one being ‘Irrevent, but Serious’. That gave plenty of room to develop creative assets that resonated with target audiences, both internally and externally. Below is a sample of the 550 projects designed and directed in the first two years at Cribl.
In August of 2019, Extreme Networks formally acquired Aerohive Networks (where I previously worked as the Creative Director). During this transition phase, I was brought on board to lead the creative and web teams, and ultimately a new direction for the company.
One of the first projects was exploratory in nature; with this new acquisition, Extreme had entered in to the Cloud Networking space — and with that, they had an opportunity to look at what a brand refresh might look like.
After interviewing select executive staff (and the CEO), I sought to explore three different themes that were important to the companies’ vision and strategy — ideating several dozens of variants (a few examples below). Ultimately we decided on a minor refresh and added tagline instead, but the exercise itself was incredibly interesting (and valuable) to me.
Another interesting branding project involved an expanding partnership with Broadcom, the maker of various chipsets essential to wifi networking devices. I was asked to create a mark (with both companies’ approval) that would signify the chipset was made by Broadcom; it’s kinda like “Intel Inside”, but for wifi chipsets.
Several months in to my tenure at Extreme, the world changed durastically — Covid-19 had begun its quick spread across the globe, and for the first time in company history, Extreme’s once-per-year in-person event, Connect, had to quickly transform in to a remote experience.
Moving an event to a virtual space — and still trying to maintain interest when the entire world was full of uncertainty — proved to be a challenge, but ultimately the event was well-advertised and well attended; a silver lining in a less than savory year.
At the same time, Extreme was beginning to explore an untapped market — competitive eGaming — which required that every device on the network have similar low-latency, high-bandwidth experiences in order to create an environment of fair competitive play. We used the online event to announce our ties to both professional and collegiate eGaming leagues, and even featured an online arcade where participants of the conference were able to compete head to head in online matches.
This was, in real time, the creation of a new segment (and brand) for the business.
As the pandemic raged on, Extreme developed a number of assets and solutions custom-tailored to meet the needs of individuals and businesses in an obviously trying time. In order to best deliver this messaging, designs had to be both compassionate and realistic to the situation at hand, but also clear and concise in how remote wi-fi solutions could help ease burdens associated with a suddenly remote workforce.
It’s with these solutions that Extreme started to emerge as a serious contender against much larger wi-fi companies in the market.
Finally, after nearly a year and a half of lockdowns and distancing, vaccines combatting C19 were released; life was beginning to return back to some semblance of “Normalcy”. At this point, Extreme announced partnerships with Major League Baseball — providing Wi-Fi 6 solutions (and analytics) to the vast majority of ballparks across North America.
One project I personally enjoyed working on was the covers for access points in the dugouts and across the stadiums; these are still in use now, and it’s always nice to see them whenever I turn on a ballgame and they shoot closeups of the dugouts.
Also, below: explainer isometrics I created in order to facilitate the adoption of cashless purchases, ticketless entry, and various other solutions we developed in order to facilitate a safer experience in the stadium.
In October of 2017, I was hired by Aerohive to run the creative direction of the company. Although a public company with hundreds of patents and a unique SaaS management solution, they had failed to gain much traction in the market.
In the first several weeks of my tenure — and in a bid to turn the company around — I was asked to run through a full rebrand exercise. Working directly with the CEO and key executive stakeholders, we successfully launched a reinvigorated brand two months later. The position of this rebrand was that we needed to feel more assertive and aggressive, and by all accounts it was highly successful.
Less than two years later, Aerohive made an exit via acquisition with very favorable terms.
Part of this rebirth process included highly portable mesh access points that could also be directly plugged in via ethernet — but still entirely managed from the cloud.
This product line became known as the Atom; I worked on both the branding of the physical hardware itself, as well as the packaging. Shortly thereafter were a series of teasers announcing this breakthrough in networking technology, as well as a full campaign surrounding the launch.
Concurrently, we also set out to establish ourselves as true innovators in the market— this included the release of the first ever 802.11ax (later named wifi 6) access points.
I was responsible for the aesthetic of 'the Future' campaign, as well as updates to all collateral, starting with the AP650 and 650X wifi 6 access points.
As we set out to 'tour' these first access points across the United States (and eventually beyond), we discovered our only limitation in garnering interest is that we only had a select number of demo unit available to tour with.
I cleverly solved this problem by opening up a unit, orthographically photographing each "layer" of the Access Point, and then printed the layered images on substrate, which was itself printed on acetate sheets. This "booklet" allowed for us to show off our technology in dozens of cities simultaneously, allowing for the successful introduction of the product to the market *before* it was even fully in production.
