Attio brand refresh

Brand design

A light-touch refresh of Attio’s marketing brand. Not a reset, but an expansion: keep what already worked, mature the overall feel, and add enough range to support a fast-moving SaaS company.

The identity had a strong signature element. It worked, but it didn’t stretch across every story and format without becoming repetitive, and parts of the system started to skew too playful. The goal was a calmer, more mature marketing layer that still felt connected to the product.

My role: led the refresh end-to-end, from visual direction to a reusable system across illustration and layout.

Visual direction

A strict brand guide didn’t fit how we worked, so the refresh focused on a small set of reusable decisions. We reviewed recent work, called out what wasn’t working, and kept what consistently felt right.

This clarified what stays consistent across pages, and where the system can flex without redeciding the basics.

Old pictograms felt too playful

Before designing anything, we aligned on what Attio should feel like. A moodboard helped collect references that felt right, then we grouped them into four lenses: power, look, voice and inspiration.

Design focused on “look”. The direction was clean and technical, but still simple and accessible. The balance was restraint. Push it too far and it becomes busy, so technical cues stayed supportive, not dominant.

Before designing anything, we aligned on what Attio should feel like. A moodboard helped collect references that felt right, then we grouped them into four lenses: power, look, voice and inspiration.

Look and feel moodboard

Grid and illustration style

Illustration needed to scale across the whole brand, not just hero moments. The system was built to work at three sizes:

Small: navbar moments, product empty states
Medium: help center, academy, cards
Large: social, blog, campaign assets

Early explorations showed the main risk. With a clean, technical direction, it’s easy to drift into overly literal visuals and become repetitive fast.

Some early explorations for illustration style

The final language stayed geometric and simple, but with more abstract meaning, so it could flex across different topics.

The grid came from the product, not a trend. Attio record screens rely on a consistent data grid, and that same grid became a reusable brand element across illustrations, pictograms, bento sections, and page layout.

Brand elements combined

Large illustrations

A system beyond UI

The product has more color and softer shapes. Marketing needed a calmer, more mature layer without feeling disconnected.

That meant building a system that could carry pages and assets even when UI wasn’t the main content. Layout and structure did more of the work, illustration covered use cases where screenshots don’t make sense, and product details were used selectively when they added clarity.

Bento style exploration

The result was a marketing toolkit that works across surfaces: website sections, help center cards, and social assets, with or without product screens.

Human layer

Portrait illustrations gave us a consistent way to represent people, especially for quotes, without relying on headshots. They replaced contributor photos and kept the set cohesive across pages and assets.

Tiempos was used selectively, mostly for touchups and quote moments, adding a more premium finish without changing the core typography system.

Outcome

The refresh added range without changing what made Attio recognizable. It introduced a clearer set of reusable rules, a scalable illustration system, and a consistent way to handle “human” moments through portraits and typographic accents.

It’s now visible across Attio’s marketing work, and stays open enough to evolve without falling back into one-off solutions.

Illustrations for help center cards

Bento draft