Zendesk Brand Identity

Senior Systems Designer

The distinctive elements within the Zendesk brand language had been adopted by numerous companies, diminishing its impact and jeopardizing brand value. Recognizing the need to evolve the brand within the broader CX sector, it became evident that a brand refresh could revitalize its positioning and brand identity system to not only set itself apart, but to do so with a new level of clarity, confidence, and freshness. The creative team embarked on an initiative to develop a system that translates the company’s tenure and trust in the industry to the newly minted approach to growth and leadership.

Client:

Zendesk

Role:

Senior Systems Designer

Year:

2021 - 2026

A creative design system

Overview

A creative design system at Zendesk needed to first establish a central source of truth for the Creative team, its pods and their specializations.

As the visual identity began to take shape, projects became opportunities for purposeful experimentation and to refine the visual system.

I took on the role of creating, maintaining, and scaling the Foundation library and the Creative guidelines. This included, but is not limited to: owning the grid, typography, and layouts for templates and guidelines, scaling and contributing to the icon library, managing the guidelines work and processes, and specializing in product imagery and iconography.

Brand Identity Foundations

The Brand Identity Foundations is a unified visual system that helps maintain greater consistency as design scales. One of the teams’ goals is to promote a greater cohesive experience through a common brand language. This not only freed up time to specialize in different facets of the design system but also to allow for easier extensions to the team through education and onboarding.