Webflow Rebrand

Webflow 2023

Webflow just turned ten. Its style was beginning to lag behind the competition. In an effort to catch up, the internal team put together a two month sprint to refresh the look of the brand and product design. The work was expanded and implemented by every designer at Webflow, the team listed here is just that core sprint group.

Me →: research, art direction, icons, type

Collaborators →: Sara Lundberg, Corey Moen, Meg Wayne, Rese Wynn, Jason Combs, Pat Szot Brand Design Hüseyin Gayiran, Sergie Magdalin, Mackenzie Child Product Design McGuire Brannon Creative Direction

Research

Webflow had attempted a few rebrands over the years. None of them shipped. So we put work into understanding what Webflow leaders and designers wanted, so that our work might see the light of day. Everyone at Webflow is pretty visually minded.

We led a few exercises and workshops. One activity asked participants to judge how different brands ranked according to our brand pillars (Powerful, Nimble, Seamless).

The brand boards were picked from a group of competitors, and from tech brands we admired.

The results showed a shared admiration for brands with end to end cohesion, and design centered approach.

Type

Somewhere in the rebrand dust cloud, a custom typeface was born. This became the unifying asset across brand and product.

The product designers were set on Inter. Or they wanted the (free) neutrality that Inter provided.

This helped in some ways. It changed our expectations for what type needed to do. Now we were asking: what can we pair with Inter for branding? Or, what disqualifies Inter from being a brand font?

Well...

it isn’t differentiated. So I sketched some that were.

Inter is like an interpolation of Arial and SF Pro. It feels somewhere between a default and a happy accident.

At this time a display optical size didn't exist. So adjusting spacing, x-height, contrast, all felt like easy ways to increase tone.

Ink traps can flair up a sans. But, at what cost??

At about this point it became clear we wanted a geo—because its crude approach to letters felt connected to the new logo, which was built of simple shapes.

I tried further abstracting the geo concept, reducing parts of letters to primary shapes, but none of these ideas reduced to a cohesive design.

Display

Text

Or You Could Use Intercom

Kyle is an designer and illustrator in Oakland, CA. He runs Very Cool, is a brand designer at GitHub, and runs Song Club Records (poorly).