<aside> 📎 This piece was originally written for Census.
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Normally, we reserve our blog space for nerding out about all things data. But we’re feeling pretty geeked about our new rebrand, and wanted to let y’all in on how the magical relaunch came to be.
If you’re reading this article (and have been on our social channels this week), you’ve probably noticed that we’ve changed a few things for the better. 🌟
New colors, new fonts, new logo (oh my!) — this is our coming-of-age story, unfolding in real-time for the data community to see. We knew that in an industry as rapidly evolving as ours, the worst thing we could do was play it safe and stick with branding that we've outgrown. We wanted our identity to reflect our enthusiasm for empowering the best and brightest teams and people with new tools and frameworks.
Census has a strong history of being bold, expressive, and opinionated from the founding team down. We wanted our brand identity to reflect this from the re-start.
Over the last few months, our team worked to find our internal ethos (think Myers-Briggs or Enneagram personality tests but for your brand). We decided to center on archetypes of [Creator](https://astute.co/the-creator-archetype/#:~:text=The Creator archetype is one,outside-the-box thinking.) (expressive, imaginative, and innovative) and Sage (clear, open-minded, and driven by experiment). These two archetypes are informed by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and further translated into brand contexts by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson in their book The Hero and the Outlaw if you want a deep dive into brand identity.
TL;DR:Â When brainstorming our new brand, we wanted to emphasize the trust our product has built in the community as an integral part of the modern data stack, without feeling too enterprise-y.
We’re all sticklers for details here at Census, whether it’s in the domain of data or design.
We knew that each detail of our new brand needed to precisely communicate the energy and narrative of our emerging reverse ETL and operational analytics space.
You’re probably familiar (we hope) with our old visual identity, which used a Google Font called Lato in a single yellow. We used it in our previous logo and broke off the C for a monogram when we needed a shortened version. It wasn’t exactly low-impact, but it didn't really tell you anything.
We wanted a 2.0 logo that pointed back to our position as leaders in operational analytics and made an impression. So we scrapped our old logo concept and started carte blanche.
We’re in an exciting, rapidly expanding new space. Our new logo had to be straightforward, enjoyable, and simple (aka something you wanted to see when browsing the Locally Optimistic or dbt Slack spaces 👋 ).
From the onset, we knew we wanted colors that were outspoken, reflecting our brand strategy and attributes. Accessibility and contrast were also tremendous drivers in our decisions on background colors and the colors we set for typography.
Without sounding too lofty, we took inspiration from the saturation of Vaporwave (you probably know it from electronic music and visual art styles in a lot of modern design) and blended it with the practicality of the color contrast of the Bauhaus movement (a German art and culture style of the 1920–30s).
The result is a vibrant and functional palette of sweet and savory colors for all of our brand communications. (And it gave us an excuse to pepper the 🦩 emoji throughout our company Slack).