In the first 30 days at ArangoDB, I sought to wrangle a cohesive brand look and feel across marketing and product. My directive was to raise brand awareness by making the avocado in the logo the focal point. The stretch goal was to tighten up the overall design of the website and produce a brand guidelines document that can be shared internally and externally to help everyone stay on brand.
ArangoDB is more than just a graph database. It doesn't take itself too seriously, but it's a seriously powerful tool. To go "Beyond Graph" means that ArangoDB can do much more than any SQL or relational databases. We wanted to update the ArangoDB brand to reflect just how fresh, organic and very versatile it is. What's more, it’s meant to be a reflection of the internal culture, supported by a very active developer community, who strive to make data relationships work in a multi-faceted way to solving big complex problems — with the help of insightful data minus the complexities.
Working as both brand designer and strategist directly with the CEO and CMO, I simplified the logo, expanded the brand colors and built out a brand guideline doc - leveraging the idea that the humble avocado can be so much more exciting when paired with a broader palette of colors from the ingredients of guacamole!
The expanded color palette in action on a GraphML handout.
The tagline "Guac On" was an internal call to action designed to evoke a smart, easy-going confidence and freshness, that captured the identity of the Arango brand. #IYKYK
This new lighter palette and simpler graphic style was rolled out in the KubeCon 22 booth designs - both at the in-person event in Valencia, Spain, and on the virtual platform. To further strengthen brand recognition, the team brought a large avocado plushie mascot to events, tradeshows and conferences, which drew a lot of attention (and selfies).
Anecdotally, it even prompted a number of questions like "If my conference badge gets scanned, will I be in the drawing to win this avocado?" I believe that's a good indication of brand activation and awareness building.
Part of making the ArangoDB brand more personable, compared to competitors like TigerGraph and Neo4j, was to create a mascot. Using the avocado as a mascot allows the brand to embrace the markets or locations it was appearing in. We were able to differentiate ourselves from the more generic and less dynamic branding by the other database players.
In order to lighten the look and feel of the website, I took a modular approach to parsing the information needed to explain what Graph was and how ArangoDB was different but more flexible as a service.
Part of the design process was also to refactor the Wordpress instance and convert the layout into Gutenberg blocks so each section can be scaled and reused throughout the site for easier content management and consistent styling. I partnered with a senior full stack web developer to roll out this new design.
