Help Scout Brand Evolution

Taking stock of our current brand highlighted bottlenecks and a disconnect between our perceived identity and reality. The way we were showing up visually and verbally didn't match the power & craft of our software, nor our authority & thought leadership in the customer service space.

To guide the upcoming changes, we set out to create a document that readdressed and reiterated our visual & verbal systems. What would become an ~80 page document set the foundation for rollout. Generating it gave us a way to imagine the end result internally and then served as a map for the full creative team to execute against.

To maintain and perpetuate our brand equity, we opted for minor improvements. We recolored and rebuilt the mark — adjusting spacing and proportions to ensure it will scale from mobile to billboards. The visual weight of the mark and logotype are now equal in the wordmark and its font is now more timeless.

To be sure our team had the tools to create work that delivered on the bold, opinionated aspirations of the brand, we created a new brand toolkit that enabled designers to build and create at scale.

We shored up our overarching visual direction and repositioned the product as our primary storytelling tool on the marketing site.

Fullscreen views, isolated crops, and animated flows tell the story of our features. High-fidelity, non-abstracted UI highlights our craft-driven approach to building software. We gave typography a more significant role, bringing messaging to life and compounding the impact of our visuals. Our new type stack includes expressive headlines and specialized faces for display, blockquotes, and more.

Have you ever heard the Johnny Cash track, One Piece at a Time? In it, Mr. Cash sings from the perspective of an automobile assembly line worker who would steal one part per day, eventually building himself a new car. We built our car (marketing site) the very same way by infusing each building block with our new design system and brand direction.

Each section component weaves our new visual direction into it. Now that all the building blocks are new & dialed-in, the whole site feels dialed-in. By focusing on the building blocks, we’ve enabled multiple teams to create more pages, easily and at scale.

All told, we completed our brand evolution in just over a year. This lean timeline was made possible by the talent of our in-house team and because our systems were built with change in mind. Our systems and guidelines-driven approach wasn’t about etching decisions in stone. Instead, our approach created an ecosystem that drives cohesion and welcomes iteration on a more global level.

Our teams now have the systems and tools to go deeper and faster at scale, charting a course toward — and enabling — the innovation to come.