Webflow Rebrand

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, Kyle

Design

Sara Lundberg

Design

Corey Moen

Design

Meg Wayne

Design

Rese Wynn

Design

Jason Combs

Design

Pat Szot

Design

Huseyin Gayiran

Product Design

Sergie Magdalin

Product Design

Mackenzie Child

Product Design

McGuire Brannon

Direction

Display

Text

Icons

Marketing icons were our best plug and play asset. They showed up across slides and site, so they needed to feel consistent and branded.

Icon Manager

At the end of the project, I built an Icon Manager which could connect product, marketing, and self serve. It also allowed us to deploy updates.

Typography

In order to connect brand and product, the custom typeface needed to functionally span display, text and ui. Inter, the product typeface, proved a good start for exploring sketches.

Monospace

A few years after the rebrand launched, I expanded the family into a set of Mono and Semimono styles. The set followed pretty standard width conventions, but was meant for marketing and display.

Research Activity

In the research phase, Pat and I put together an activity to help understand what Webflow leaders and designers wanted. This pulled together moodboards from competitors, and asked visually-minded stakeholders to provide feedback.

Results

The results of the activity showed a shared admiration for brands with end to end cohesion, and design systems that felt more like a design language.

I’m a brand designer in Oakland, CA. If I'm not baking or reading, you’ll find me at Savers. I run Very Cool Studio, work as a brand designer at GitHub, and run Song Club Records.

In my experience, design is what it does. Designers (me, Kyle) have the tendency to fall in love with the conveyor belt. And as we all fall in love with the clean doingness of AI, it has become more and more important to ask “okay but what does it do.” Design is the opinion-making process for answering that question. I sorta think this is what trust the process means. At the start of every project I’m a little dumb—at the end I’ll be a little smarter. If I’m doing my job right, the work will be a little more than me—kinder, smarter, more true to its purpose—leaving me in my state of stupor for the next project.

And maybe because I see myself as a little dumb, I think of most design problems as interpersonal problems. I still haven’t found a good enough idea, a plan so god-tier that it’s self-convincing. And the subjectivities that get in the way of those smart plans are only a problem because we say so.

If you made it this far, let's talk — that's the interpersonal part.

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