Help Scout Brand Evolution

While brand is always evolving at Help Scout, it became clear we’d outgrown our current look & feel. The way we thought about ourselves, and framed our product, became disconnected from how we were showing up. So, we set out on a 14-month journey to evolve our brand foundation, messaging, identity, and system.

To guide the upcoming changes, we created an ~80 page brand guidelines artifact to set the foundation for rollout. By defining each facet of the brand and creating core deliverables within, we gave the full creative team a map & toolkit to execute against.

Rather than overhaul, we opted to preserve equity and refine our logo. We modernized the wordmark, recolored it, and adjusted spacing & proportions so it could scale from mobile to billboards.

To be sure our team had the tools to deliver on the promise of our simple, powerful product & brand, we redefined core elements to drive consistency and allow teams to design & build at scale.

We shored up our overarching visual direction and repositioned the product as our primary storytelling tool in our marketing materials. Fullscreen views, isolated crops, and animated flows tell the story of our features. High-fidelity, non-abstracted UI highlights our craft-driven approach to building software.

We gave typography a more significant role, bringing messaging to life and compounding the impact of our visuals. Our new type stack includes expressive headlines and specialized faces for display, blockquotes, and more.

Have you ever heard the Johnny Cash track, One Piece at a Time? In it, Cash sings from the perspective of an assembly line worker who would steal one part per day, eventually building himself a new car. We built our car (marketing site) the very same way by infusing each building block with our new design system and brand direction.

Each section component weaves our new visual direction into it. Now that all the building blocks are new & dialed-in, the whole site feels dialed-in. By focusing on the building blocks, we’ve enabled multiple teams to create more pages, easily and at scale.

All told, we completed our brand evolution in just over a year. This lean timeline was made possible by the talent of our in-house team and because our systems were built with change in mind. Our systems and guidelines-driven approach wasn’t about etching decisions in stone. Instead, our approach created an ecosystem that drives cohesion and welcomes iteration on a more global level.

Our teams now have the systems and tools to go deeper and faster at scale, charting a course toward—and enabling—the innovation to come.