Taking an incomplete rebrand to a global audience
Braze, the all-in-one customer engagement platform, had big plans to go through a large rebrand to better showcase all of their new products, and speak to their customers on a deeper level.
At the time they had come to us, the Braze team was having an extremely difficult time managing their site through their platforms, and needed a system to follow in their rebuild.
The ultimate list of needs from the design team were was a new website design language, a fully built out design system, a new illustration style, and an entirely new website that follows their rebrand.
To kick it off, the rebrand was not 100% complete yet on the Braze side, and it had to be 100% completed (development included) in 3 months. This meant we had to be incredibly strategic in our component planning, ensuring that any sort of brand elements can be fit in.
Process
Working with such an incredibly large team, the process with Braze was quite different than most projects.
The final say on the web elements were far up the food chain, and had to be approved every step of the way. To ensure that we stayed on track, daily calls were made with different stakeholders across the Braze team.
Of the pieces of the brand we received, it was pretty easy to configure the basic components that would live on the website. In our initial pitch meetings, getting these building blocks approved and shipped to development were extremely quick.
The biggest challenge though, was the illustrations, and how they would fit into the main hero components, and how the unique brand elements would remain crisp at large visual sizes, while remaining a small file size.
Working with 3D illustrations are usually quite challenging in the website world. We don’t yet have the tools to get the image sizes super small (such as with webp and photos), and they are just too complicated to be turned into a vector (such as the super small .svgs), but they are way too complicated to blow up large and not have a super heavy file. So we had to get creative on how to sell the brand elements cohesively, when we needed a large brand moment.
The solution to this was a layered approach to all of the brand elements. Stacking photos behind masks that replicated the fun curves of their branded 3d elements, that sat behind proceeding components, ultimately gave the same feeling of movement as the 3D illustrations provided to us.
Braze also had an extremely large knowledge base, so it was essential that we came up with strong solutions to utilize every bit of the content they already had to their fullest potential.
All methods of applicable structured data that was available to us was used within each knowledge base template.
A volume-intense, high-authority, and tight timeline made for an almost all-consuming project for the 8 weeks design was involved.
Overall, every member of the design team was full-gas from the beginning to end, and the end product shows. Every page has custom illustrations, many have bespoke components to illustrate each value that Braze offers, and is technically superior to many of the competitors sites, thanks to the extremely talented developers on this project.
