When strategy evolves, so must the brand: our rebranding story

Amplemarket began as a comprehensive solution designed to help businesses connect with other businesses in the most effective and efficient way. Our mission has always been clear: to drive growth for companies — a goal that remains at the heart of everything we do.

From the start, Amplemarket offered a suite of powerful, standalone products that made us the most complete all-in-one sales solution on the market. AI has always been an integral part of the product, and over the years we developed a number of specialized products to improve precision and efficiency, such as our AI Copywriter (now Duo Copywriter), which crafts personalized messages for every prospect, and our AI Replier (now Duo Inbox), which generates context-aware responses automatically.

At the start of 2024, we set about creating an exciting new way to use Amplemarket: the AI Sales Copilot. This fresh approach integrates all our products into a seamless, unified experience, enabling users to unlock even greater potential in their sales efforts. Importantly, this is not a replacement for our existing products but an additional option for those seeking a more integrated workflow.

With this innovation, and as we work to lead the future of AI-driven sales, we decided to embark on a rebranding journey — one that would reflect our evolving vision and commitment to empowering businesses in new and transformative ways.

Timeline

We started this project in March with a clear and exact deadline: the launch of our new product, Duo, at SaaStr 2024, which kicked off on September 10th. This gave us six months to complete the rebranding, update the website, and prepare the marketing strategy to cover all phases — before, during, and after the launch.

Discovery

We began with a Discovery phase, a crucial step in which we established the foundation of the project and clarified the what’s, why’s, and how’s. This phase laid the groundwork for the visual and communication positioning of our new direction.

Our process started by engaging key stakeholders and team members directly involved with the AI Copilot initiative. The focus was on exploring the vision for the future of Amplemarket, rather than just analyzing what Amplemarket represented at that time.

To guide this exploration, we posed a series of targeted questions aimed at uncovering the essence of the brand and its goals:

• In one sentence, what is Amplemarket?
• What is the main problem Amplemarket is addressing?
• How will Amplemarket solve that problem?
• What makes Amplemarket unique?
• Who is Amplemarket’s target audience?
• What do we want people to feel when using Amplemarket?
• If Amplemarket were a person, how would we describe them? How would they sound?

These questions were instrumental in aligning the team on the vision and ensuring a strong and unified direction for the project.

Moodboard

With the foundations in place, we moved on to setting the visual baseline for our brand’s journey. This is where the moodboard came into play.

The moodboard allowed us to look at companies that get it right, those with great use of colors, fonts, imagery, and, most importantly, the right vibe. By combining these visual references, we aimed to identify a style that truly captured our brand’s personality.

This step was essential because words alone can evoke vastly different visuals for different people, shaped by their unique experiences and emotions. A moodboard ensured we weren’t just guessing. Instead, we were intentionally creating a consistent look and feel that we, as a company, could align with.

Of course, we made adjustments along the way, but the foundational choices from the moodboard kept us grounded throughout the process.

We already knew we wanted the flexibility to use black and white alongside colors — a feature our old visual identity lacked, which had been a limitation in our product design and in creating more refined brand materials. With this goal in mind, we chose to blend elements from the first and second approaches in our visual exploration.

Visual Exploration

This is where all the emotions come into play for creatives like us. It’s a whirlwind of excitement and frustration — a mix of having fun, falling in love with an idea, then feeling tired of it just a few days later. There are days when inspiration flows freely, and others where the blank canvas seems overwhelming (even if, in hindsight, those “blank” days were more productive than they felt).

Eventually, though, everything starts to click. The scattered ideas — both old and new — come together into a cohesive visual direction that truly reflects our brand’s personality. It’s a journey full of ups and downs, but one that’s always worth it in the end.

As we worked through this process, we realized we wanted our brand to feel innovative, modern, and technological. We planned to achieve this with unique grotesk typefaces and a mix of sober and vibrant colors. At the same time, we wanted to keep a human and approachable feel, bringing in illustrations to add warmth and friendliness to the overall look.

That’s when Lourenço Providência, an exceptional Portuguese illustrator based in New York, joined the process. His impressive portfolio, including work for clients like The New York Times and his standout collaboration with BUCK on MailChimp’s “Wherever The Road Takes Us” campaign, made it clear he was the right choice to help make our brand more distinctive and unique. And we couldn’t have been more right — his illustrations became a powerful way to solidify and elevate our brand’s personality.

His initial illustration tests helped us refine the visual direction and expand on an idea from a previous design experiment: incorporating animated gradients into the illustrations. The adaptation was subtle but impactful — using the gradient as an extension of the illustration itself to represent the empowerment AI brings to humans, establishing the concept of Human + AI. This marked a turning point in defining our visual identity, and as you can see below, it closely resembles the language we ultimately adopted.

Overall Visual Identity

Logomark

Designing a logomark that truly represents a company while remaining unique is always a challenge. With so many logomarks already out there, and given that they often distill a company’s essence into a minimalist and abstract symbol, it’s surprisingly easy to unintentionally create something that resembles what someone else has already done. It’s also very common for the same symbol to have many different interpretations, with some being quite specific and shaped by personal experiences. We need to navigate all these variables with care in a delicate process where every step requires thoughtful consideration and balance.

We probably created hundreds of experiments until narrowing it down to three base ideas we wanted to follow. We then teamed up with Lucas Field, a great logo designer whose attention to detail is second to none, and whose vision perfectly aligned with our minimalist logo approach. Having these three base visual concepts, we came up with two interesting logomarks — one focused on the growth and the letter A, and the other highlighting our all-in-one solution.

We ultimately chose the first option, and after making a few refinements, we arrived at our final logomark:

Combination Mark

For the wordmark, we chose Satoshi, a modernist sans-serif typeface with a blend of grotesk-style and geometrically designed letterforms. Its curves harmonize beautifully with those of the logomark, creating a visually balanced and cohesive identity.

Satoshi's ascenders and descenders were slightly too large for our logo, so we adjusted them to ensure the wordmark fit perfectly with the logomark.

Typography

Typography is a crucial element of any brand, and we faced some challenges with Inter, the typeface we had been using. In the end, we opted for Labil Grotesk, a typeface with a strong grotesque foundation and playful details, offering the versatility and uniqueness that perfectly align with our visual identity.

Colors

For our color palette, we wanted a versatile system that could be bold and colorful for eye catching brand applications, while also offering the flexibility for more neutral materials, like when presenting product updates.

We selected a dark shade close to black and a soft beige as the foundation, complemented by a range of darker and lighter unique hues. To add energy and vibrancy, we introduced a striking orange — our "Phoenix Orange" — bringing a dynamic and impactful touch to the palette.

Gradients

For gradients, we combined some colors from the main palette with new complementary hues to add depth and visual interest. These gradients are designed to be used exclusively over the beige background and the darker shades from the main palette, ensuring a cohesive and striking effect.

To add variety, we can use gradients to bring soft touches of color to a composition, extend the impact and meaning of illustrations, or highlight keywords in a sentence, ensuring a subtle yet purposeful effect.

Illustrations

As mentioned above, the brand illustrations were created by Lourenço Providência. His illustrations have a distinctive style that contributes significantly to the brand’s personality, particularly by emphasizing its human aspect.

The central theme of the illustrations is a humanoid character created to represent a super sales rep, someone salespeople can easily relate to. Over time, this character grew into a symbol of Duo itself, intentionally designed without specific gender or racial traits to ensure it resonated with everyone.

The gradient in the illustration acts as an extension of the artwork, amplifying its meaning and impact.

For instance, in this illustration, the gradient gives the character superpowers.

In this one, it represents the AI side of the product's Human + AI aspect.

Doodles

Since illustrations are challenging to maintain, costly to scale, and difficult to create consistently as the brand grows, we decided to develop a collection of doodles. While these doodles don’t replace the illustrations — which we plan to continue creating — they reflect the way people think, similar to making small notes in a notebook to highlight something or remember it for posterity. Designed to align with the illustration style, the doodles are easier to adapt and expand, complementing the brand while serving both illustrative and guidance purposes.

Illustrative:

Guidance:

Conclusion

All of these graphic elements — typography, colors, gradients, illustrations, and doodles — bring variety and dynamism to a versatile visual identity that truly represents our brand.

Of course, a brand isn’t defined by its visual identity alone. We’ve also worked on refining the brand’s voice, values, and behaviors, along with other elements that together shape the holistic brand experience.

A brand is a living organism, constantly evolving and growing alongside the company. If it isn’t, that’s usually a red flag. With that in mind, we still have plenty of exciting work ahead of us.

Our next steps include:

• Continuing to build a robust brand system to make it easy for the team to use and adapt  brand materials
• Exploring custom AI models to streamline and scale the creation of brand assets
• Introducing a motion identity to the mix that aligns with the brand
• Expanding the brand to sub-brands for some exciting ideas currently on our plate
• Continuing to integrate the brand with the platform to create a unified and seamless experience

Stay tuned. This is just the beginning of something amazing!