Northpass, Inc. Rebrand
The Better Way to Train Your Customers
Northpass was at a crossroads with its brand. It was recently renamed, and a logo was designed about two years before my arrival. I was tasked to refresh the brand. I connected a brand strategy to the visual expression of their attributes. Northpass is the hero, and we utilized that archetype by building a visual brand language around it. We began building the brand's narrative, evoking our customer-centric marketing in fun, pioneering, playful, and results-driven ways. The name conveys a sense of place. We began to explore what that meant through the use of a tagline and our infamous mascot. Northpass is the better way to train customers, and so we took our customers on that journey.
Role: Art Direction, Brand Strategy, Visual Identity, UI Design, Illustration, and Design
©2023 Northpass, Inc.
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Brand Guidelines
Anticipating growth for our design team, I wrote and developed brand guidelines to help build consistency externally for our brand and internally with marketing, engineering, sales, and customer success teams.
Company Values and Department Swag
As we rolled out the new brand, we began sharing our company values and creating swag for our departments to generate company pride.
Content and Editorial Design
We generated a lot of content and digital ads to drive the sales pipeline. Here are a few examples of how we utilized the visual brand language across case studies, infographics, and ads.
Marketing Website
I designed our original product page to help establish our UI style guide. It eventually evolved as we re-designed and rebuilt our website in-house. This initially helped onboard a new designer and assist our agency partner in engineering the product page.
Style Guide and Product Page Design: Cameron Nelson and Chuck Mallott
Website Design: Iga von Geyso
Our Journey into Customer Education
We introduced a new tagline, The Better Way to Train Your Customers, in the new fiscal year of 2023. We began sharing the journey of Customer Success in our marketing materials, at our events, and within our digital campaigns. Exploring the metaphor of a trail representing the way Northpass guided our audience to success as they reached their true north.
Design: Cameron Nelson and Iga von Geyso
ABC’s of Digital Customer Education Book
This was a companion piece to our booth design at events, and the buzz was instant. If you’re a Customer Success advocate, this book is for you and your kids!
Leaders spoke …
“It’s never too early (or too late) to learn about Customer Education!”
Digital Campaigns
We began threading that visual narrative through some of our campaigns now that there was a brand narrative, whether we were promoting how you could customize with Northpass or sharing new content for our audience.
Design: Cameron Nelson, Chuck Mallott, and Iga von Geyso
Customization Campaign
Business Case for Digital Customer Education Landing Page
Meet Howie
Over time, we introduced our mascot, Howie. His name derives from the Polish word “Jak” meaning “How.” With half our team based in Poland, it was appropriate that his name has roots there. Howard represents “how we” help our customers on their journey with the hero, Northpass.
Design: Cameron Nelson and Iga von Geyso
Howie expresses Northpass’ values too.
Custom Howie emojis were brought into our Slack to help interweave some fun into our day-to-day. Adding levity to the work week and creating delight.
Northpass was eventually acquired by the leader in customer success, Gainsight.
Read the Press Release here