A rebrand is ten percent drawing and ninety percent finding

Overview

Role

Design lead for the refresh. Identity, system, asset audit, brand hub, launch assets.

Team

Nico Watson (President) · Stefano D'Avascio (product design) · Simon Sothcott (marketing) · Romario Lourenço (product) · Connie, Heather, Hervé, Stephanie across support, social and internal

Launched

22 May 2025

Not a rebrand

The company was clear about what this wasn’t. From the announcement:

Sendible had been running since 2009 and had grown from a publishing tool into a platform used by agencies and multi-location brands. The identity hadn’t kept up — not wrong, just older than the company had become. The framing we landed on was refinement rather than reinvention: same mission, sharper expression.

That framing did real work later. It set the bar for every decision — does this make us clearer, or just different?

The mark

The concept came from what the product actually does. Not scheduling, not publishing — amplification. Someone with something to say, reaching further than they could alone.

Loops. A voice echoing outwards, each loop representing growth, reach and genuine connection. Layered, because amplification compounds.

I said it this way when we launched, and I’d still stand by it:

“We explored a lot of ideas. But it was the concept of a voice growing stronger, echoing outwards, that really resonated. Our logo is made of loops, each one representing growth, reach, and genuine connection. That’s what Sendible enables.”

The identity extended past the mark into colour, type and tone of voice — the last of which mattered more than usual, because a social media tool that sounds corporate is arguing against itself.

The audit

Here’s the part that took the longest and appears in nobody’s portfolio.

A new mark is worthless until the old one is gone. So before anything shipped, I audited every place Sendible’s identity lived:

Each entry recorded the asset type, file name, where it lived — theme, module, CSS file, page content or email template — its format, dimensions, file size, and whether it was hardcoded or editable.

What we found

Two things made this harder than swapping a file.

The logo was hardcoded almost everywhere. The obvious assumption is that a CMS holds your logo in brand settings and every module references it — change once, changes everywhere. It didn’t. The mark was baked directly into the header modules, the no-nav header, the sign-up iframe, the 2018 theme’s header and footer, four landing-page header partials, and every email template.

There was no switch. There was a list, and the list had to be made before anyone could start.

And the brand had escaped the website. The ideas portal, the help centre, the referral platform, the webinar system — four separate products, none of them ours, each holding our logo. Plus an email signature template for every person on the team, each carrying the old mark in an image.

That’s the finding I’d want a hiring manager to take from this. The interesting part of a brand refresh isn’t the mark. It’s that an identity leaks into every system a company touches, and nobody has a list until someone makes one.

Thirty-four workstreams

Rolling it out meant coordinating work I didn’t own, across teams I didn’t manage.

Thirty-four tracked items across eight categories — website, product, marketing assets, sales materials, customer support, internal and HR, partners and affiliates, and brand infrastructure. Each with a priority, an owner and a deadline.

Marketing had the website and email templates. Product had the app UI — logo, headers, dashboard, favicon, the white-label loading spinner, transactional emails, invoices, the Chrome extension. Social had profile images and banners. Support had the Zendesk centre, template replies and help guides. HR had internal documentation and onboarding. Partnerships had affiliate assets.

The product side deserves its own mention. A marketing refresh that stops at the website leaves customers logging into yesterday’s brand every morning. Stefano was brought in specifically so the website and the product would match, and Romario audited the product surfaces — dashboard, authentication and password reset flows, favicon, receipts, three email types, the loading spinner, third-party integration screens.

The brand hub

We built a public brand hub — logos, colours, typography, tone of voice, templates and downloads. It’s still live.

One decision on that site is worth pulling out, because it’s small and it’s the kind of thing that separates a page that looks right from one that works.

Several sections had been built as images — colour blocks, typographic specimens, headings. I pushed to rebuild them as actual colour and actual text.

Two reasons. A designer visiting a brand hub wants to copy the hex value, and you can’t copy an image. And text baked into an image can’t resize, so on a phone the type either shrank past legibility or overflowed.

The rest of that review was ordinary craft work — animation timing tightened from 200ms to 100ms, hover states on the primary CTA, corner radius behaviour, logos being squashed by a container, excessive padding between the logo pack and media kit sections on mobile, and a navigation fix so someone arriving at the typography section from colour didn’t skip past the main typography content.

The About page

The brand hub is where you look the identity up. The About page is where you meet it — and it’s the page that had to prove the claim rather than repeat it.

The mark became a graphic system

The loops didn’t stay in the logo. Blurred vector forms derived from the mark sit behind the hero, and the loop asset reappears as a section device further down. Someone scrolling the page absorbs the identity’s shape several times without ever looking at the logo.

That’s the difference between a mark and a system. A mark identifies you. A system means a page still looks like you with the logo cropped out.

One typographic device, used consistently

Amplify your voice. Be remarkable. · Why people stick with us. · Meet the team behind Sendible.

An italic emphasis on a single word per heading, always on the word carrying the meaning. Small, cheap, and it gives the writing a voice on a page where every competitor sounds the same.

R.E.A.L

The tone of voice framework — Reliable, Empowering, Authentic, Leading — given its own section rather than buried in a document nobody outside marketing reads. Values on an About page are usually decoration. Making them an acronym people can actually recall is what turns them into something a team uses in a meeting.

Twenty-nine videos

This is the decision I’d defend hardest, because it was by far the most work and it’s the one that could most easily have been cut.

Every person on the About page appears as a short looping video rather than a headshot. Twenty-nine of them, across a remote-first company spanning Newcastle to Seattle, Belgrade to Manila.

The brand promise is behind Sendible is a team of real people here to support you every step of the way. A grid of static headshots states that. A grid of people moving demonstrates it — and for an audience of agencies deciding whether to trust a platform with their clients’ accounts, the difference between stating and demonstrating is the whole page.

It cost coordination across every timezone in the company and a lot of chasing. I’d do it again. Most About pages are the least-visited, least-loved page a company owns, and the reason is that they’re written to be adequate rather than built to prove anything.

The story told straight

The history section says plainly that Sendible started in London in 2009, joined ASG in 2021, and launched a new identity in 2025. Acquisitions usually disappear from About pages. Naming it — and naming what it changed and what it didn’t — is more convincing than the version where a company appears to have grown by pure momentum.

Launch

22 May 2025. Announcement blog with quotes from the Chairman, the President and me. A launch video showing the evolution of the mark. A homepage takeover with a before-and-after slider and a brand timeline. Updated ad creative across every channel. Digital merch — wallpapers, Zoom backgrounds, Canva templates. A hashtag campaign. Physical merch for reviewers and partners.

The public write-up is still up, and so is the brand hub.

What I take from it

I’ve spent most of my career on product and growth work, and this is the project that most changed how I think about both.

A brand isn’t the mark. It’s every surface a customer touches, most of which no single team owns and none of which appears on a design file. The audit taught me to ask a question I now ask everywhere: where else does this live? It’s the same question behind designing report states rather than report screens, and behind treating view mode as a visibility state rather than a separate page. Find every instance before you change one.

The other thing is smaller. This project only worked because eight teams did work I couldn’t do and didn’t manage. My contribution to that wasn’t design — it was making a list clear enough that people could act on it without me in the room.