Part I - Context

A brand evolving faster than its system.

Commune was entering a new stage as a company.

As the business grew, so did the number of people, teams, products, and touchpoints communicating under the Commune brand. Marketing campaigns, sales materials, internal communication, product experiences, events, and presentations were all being created at speed.

But the visual system supporting them had not evolved at the same pace.

What began as small inconsistencies gradually became a broader brand challenge: different parts of the organization were communicating as Commune, but they did not always feel like the same Commune.

The Problem

The issue was not that individual materials were poorly designed.

The issue was that they were being created within different contexts, by different teams, with different priorities—and without a sufficiently strong system connecting them.

The result was fragmentation:

The Challenge

This meant the project could not simply be a visual refresh.

Creating a new set of colors, typefaces, or templates might improve individual outputs, but it would not solve the underlying problem.

The challenge was to create a visual system capable of connecting:

Brand → Marketing → Sales → Product → Internal Communication

At the same time, Commune had to balance two sides of its identity.

As a B2B technology company, the brand needed to feel credible, structured, and trustworthy.

But Commune had also grown from a culture centered around community, relationships, and human connection.

The opportunity was to create a system that could hold both.

Part II - The Audit

Where do we begin amidst the chaos.

Commune already had an established visual identity, existing guidelines, years of accumulated assets, and teams that had developed their own ways of working with the brand. That made the project particularly sensitive.

Changing the visual identity meant potentially affecting workflows, internal teams, product touchpoints, and the familiarity people had already built with Commune.

So rather than beginning with visual exploration, I began with an audit.

The objective was not simply to catalogue what looked inconsistent. It was to understand why those inconsistencies existed, where they were coming from, and which problems actually needed to be solved.

Technical Issues

• Brand colors did not consistently meet WCAG accessibility standards.

• Layout rules were unclear or inconsistently applied.

• Typography hierarchy lacked consistency.

• Readability varied across formats and backgrounds.

Core Issues

• Marketing and sales materials often felt visually disconnected.

• Different teams had developed their own interpretations of the brand.

• Product, corporate, and communication touchpoints lacked a shared visual language.

• Existing guidelines described individual elements but provided limited guidance on how they should work together.

Understanding this distinction was important.

A stronger brand would need to solve both.

Part III - The Key Discovery

Consistency was not the real problem. Connection was.

At first, the challenge appeared to be inconsistency.

But the deeper issue was that different parts of Commune had evolved independently.

Marketing had its language.

Sales had its language.

Product had its language.

Internal communication had its language.

Trying to force every touchpoint to look identical would not solve that. The real opportunity was to build a system flexible enough to support different needs while still making every expression feel unmistakably connected to Commune.

That became the foundation for the next phase.

Part IV - Visual Exploration

Building a system, not a collection of assets.

With the findings from the audit as a foundation, I began exploring how Commune’s visual identity could evolve into a more distinctive and cohesive system.

Rather than redesigning individual assets in isolation, I focused on establishing a visual language that could scale across different touchpoints—from product and marketing communication to presentations, events, internal materials, and motion.

The exploration focused on four core components:

The goal was not to make every piece of communication look identical.

It was to give them a shared visual DNA.

A system that could feel:

Structured, but not rigid.

Technical, but still human.

Confident, without becoming corporate.

Flexible, while remaining recognizably Commune.

Part IV - Project Takeaways

The anticlimatic thing we call reality.

The project ultimately did not progress into full implementation.

During its development, Commune entered a period of corporate restructuring and its priorities shifted, changing the conditions around the initiative.

While the visual system was not deployed at the scale originally intended, the project revealed something more important about the underlying brand challenge.

Commune did not simply need better individual design outputs.

It needed a stronger connection between brand strategy, internal culture, product expression, and external communication.

Looking back, I would approach one part of the project differently.

I would establish a cross-functional brand team much earlier in the process—bringing together representatives from design, marketing, sales, product, and other key functions before developing the visual system.

A brand system can only create consistency if the organization responsible for using it is aligned around the same principles.

That became one of my biggest takeaways from the project.

Some key takeaways :