Introducing Zenhub’s Refreshed Brand and Website

We’ve been up to something really special here at Zenhub. Today, we’re excited to announce and unveil our brand refresh, new logo, and updated website.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through this multi-month-long rebranding process and let you in on why and how we’ve made these changes, our journey along the way, and what we’re excited to bring to the table in this next chapter.

The evolution of Zenhub’s product and brand

Over the past few years, our company and product have gone through many positive changes. We opened up the Zenhub experience to non-GitHub users to see clear, up-to-date roadmaps based on GitHub data and launched powerful features for growing teams like automated sprints, planning poker, productivity insights, and much more. Our organization has grown, and we even received our first round of institutional funding. So much has changed, in fact, that we started to feel like the previous space theme brand wasn’t fully conveying our product evolution, what we’re about as a company, and the problems we solve for our global community of customers and users.

Deciding to shift how customers and the industry see you as an organization isn’t something we take lightly. The 8000+ global teams that trust us came to know and love us as a powerful tool to unify development and project management in GitHub. And while we certainly do still fulfill this promise, changes in our product have allowed us to hone in on another aspect of running and scaling modern software development teams: productivity management. With a continued focus on delivering a best-in-class developer experience, we help align teams, break down silos, and remove friction so growing organizations can ship better software more efficiently and predictably.

Thabang Mashologu, Zenhub’s VP of Marketing, reflects, “We’ve added a lot of valuable features and capabilities to our product over the last few years. More than ever, software teams feel the pressure to be more productive. At Zenhub, we’ve recognized this shift and evolved from a simple but mighty GitHub extension to a central project and productivity management platform for thousands of startups, open source projects, and high-growth organizations. We want to reflect this evolution visually in a way that will meaningfully engage with our customers, users, and global community members.”

A brand refresh is an exhaustive process. We partnered with two excellent organizations that could take our visual identity to the next level – with Titan ONE supporting the redesign of our logo and visual brand identity and Pivot & Pilot Creative supporting our website refresh.

Our entire marketing team and many people across our organization have contributed to making this project a reality. To coordinate this complex cross-functional project, we planned and tracked our work in Zenhub. We used epics to group together related issues, labels to easily identify which issues belonged to the brand refresh from the board view, story pointing and planning poker to measure velocity and track efforts, and the roadmap to get a birds-eye-view of how the rebranding process was measuring up against our other work.

Introducing our new logo: the force multiplier for software teams

Our new logo is one of the biggest parts of our brand refresh. Truthfully, we can’t even call this a logo redesign because, funny enough, we never actually had a proper logo before – just a wordmark! Getting the chance to reflect on who we are, and who we want to be as a platform, and how to represent that visually was a challenging and exciting process for our internal team and the team at Titan ONE.

Scott Lanaway from Titan ONE shares their team’s perspective on the importance of this project, “The brand needed to catch up with the platform’s evolution – the way it’s been embraced by a large and ever-growing community of developers to do amazing work – and it was exciting to help bring that to life.”

“One hurdle we faced during this massive project was finding a symbol to accurately represent who we are and what we do,” reflects Elspeth Tory, Zenhub’s Creative Director. “It’s a challenge to find something that visually connects with how we want people to feel when they think about Zenhub. There’s a lot that it needs to encompass.”

How do we convey the idea of Zenhub being a welcoming, central platform for innovative software-led organizations to build better software together? How do we transmit Zenhub’s role in helping technical and non-technical team members come together to maximize their productivity and efficiency?

Our answer is the multiplier.

Here’s the story of our new logo from our updated Brand Guide:

The multiplier is a key part of our logo. It is one of our most valuable assets and is synonymous with our vision: enabling the most forward-thinking organizations to engineer a brighter future. It is the tangible symbol of our brand and represents everything we are.

We call the symbol “the multiplier” because our tool enables startup teams to dramatically increase their productivity and velocity, with developers at the center. The four rounded shapes of the multiplier represent a modern startup organization’s core functions: business, engineering, design, and product.

Zenhub delivers shared clarity and cross-functional visibility, and efficiency through agile automation and is a force multiplier for team productivity. The multiplier also represents a wildcard operator, reflecting infinite opportunities to create and the limitless potential of code.

Also, let’s address the elephant in the room. You’re not seeing things. We have updated our name from ZenHub to Zenhub, removing the ‘camelcase’. Why? To visually streamline the look, so it aligns with other elements of our new brand.

A happy, bright brand refresh

Our fancy new logo is only a part of our new visual identity. We also worked with both Titan ONE and Pivot & Pilot to hone in on a brand that represents us.

While we love space (who doesn’t love aliens and spaceships?), we’re a long way off from it being a viable home for humans. And we want our brand to reflect the humans behind the world’s most innovative software.

“We have a global community that fell in love with us and have become used to how we represent ourselves visually. With this project, we wanted to ensure we maintained a level of integrity and were respecting and staying true to our roots. It was important to honor our original brand while elevating it to reflect who we are now and where we’re going as a company.” Thabang shares, “We also wanted to humanize our brand. We help people work together more efficiently and productively to achieve goals. Zenhub is about fostering teamwork and collaboration.”

As a product catered to the developer experience, we do a lot of thinking about developer happiness and productivity. And what we’ve learned is that happy developers are developers that spend more time coding and doing meaningful work and less time doing redundant, annoying tasks. Happy developers are at the core of why we’re even doing this at all. It informed our typography, color, illustration choices, and so much more. It’s also our promise to you.

“By putting concepts of productivity and developer happiness — that is, job satisfaction, wellbeing, and even joy — at the center of our brand, we are helping to deliver on that mission,” Thabang shares.

Our updated and expanded color palette

Going from a few colors within our palette to an expanded palette of bright, happy, and beautiful colors is any designer’s dream come true. We maintained our classic ‘Zenhub blue’ to pay homage to where we came from and remain recognizable. But we’ve added a range of blues, greens, purples, and even pinks.

Elspeth shares, “As part of our new brand, we’ve expanded our color palette to better reflect the diversity of individuals, teams, and thought, especially as we consider our open source projects. The decision to use a bright secondary palette grounded by our core primary colors connects to how Zenhub allows teams to work transparently and efficiently without the interruptions or delays that prevent developers from doing their best work. We wanted the updated palette to reflect that Zenhub is a software that helps keep teams happy.”

New, modern typography

We also opted to switch to a more modern, clean typography. Say hello to the Graphik font family.

A creative new illustration system

Developing an illustration system unique to Zenhub was a super important and fun part of this project. Not only would it allow us to express our brand in fun new ways, but it would help incorporate elements of our multiplier logo across various touchpoints.

Alejandro Quinteros, Creative Director at Pivot & Pilot, shares, “Collaboratively with the Zenhub team, we defined that the new illustration style and overall brand aesthetic needed to reflect Zenhub’s innovative and cutting-edge software. To stand out in the market, we opted for an out-of-the-box visual direction that made the new brand feel unique and professional at the same time. We did so by creating a balance between abstract and recognizable geometric shapes, a recurrent modular pattern inspired by Zenhub’s new emblem, as well as the use of colorful gradients.”

Beautiful gradients, coding symbols, and human illustrations are now a key part of our visual identity.

Unveiling our website redesign

Naturally, after embarking on this brand refresh journey, the next step was transforming our website, the home base for everything about Zenhub. Working with Pivot & Pilot’s team, we redesigned our entire website to incorporate the new brand and streamline the user experience.

Alejandro shares, “For Zenhub’s new website, we had to walk within the fine line between edgy and sleek. The visual language in the tech world tends to be very clean and minimalist, an aesthetic oftentimes associated with innovation. We maintained a bold aesthetic across backgrounds and illustrations and followed a strict grid system to create a sense of structure and organization. Throughout the site, there is a strong harmony between bold and sleek sections to portray a sense of cutting-edge innovation.”

One of our net new pages we’re most excited about? Our sleek product overview page provides an overview of exactly what productivity management is and what Zenhub has to offer.

That’s a wrap

We’re so proud of our new logo and brand and excited to share it with the world.

“I hope the new brand will strengthen the already deep connections we have with our users and customers who experience Zenhub as a welcoming, central place to build great software together. Our look and feel is fresh and different because we’re fresh and different and offer a unique value and industry-leading dev experience to startups and high-growth organizations around the world,” Thabang says.

We’re so excited for you to explore our new visual identity on zenhub.com, and let us know your thoughts on Twitter or LinkedIn.