TABLEAU BRANDING, VISUAL DESIGN, DESIGN SYSTEM • 2021
Unifying the Tableau brand and identity
Working closely with our creative director, lead art director, and other leaders of the marketing organization, I helped lead the design team in reimagining Tableau's visual identity, logo, branding, and design systems. The style guide and resources we had in place felt dated and didn't represent the direction our company was heading. So we got to work. This is a collection of the work that I helped create, pitch, and implement for a new Tableau brand that celebrates the energy, passion, and creativity of our product and people.
Design Objectives
One of the guiding principles we followed was to "make sure Tableau looks and feels like Tableau." We have a great brand. But things were getting scattered. Styles and systems in place weren't up to date. However, unlike other rebrandings of the last few years, our goal was not to create a revolutionary new identity. What we wanted was an evolution to highlight and unify all the things great about our brand.
Consistency across all our design work. To achieve this we needed to update the corporate style guide to support a unified style all designers would build from.
Beyond just the visuals, our brand needed an ethos and words to match the direction the company, product, and vision were heading.
Reimagine all the elements inside the graphic style guide. This included our corporate logo, colors, icons, ads, photos, and more.
Build the libraries and resources to share the work and drive adoption for all the new assets across the company.
Designing with data
The Tableau brand as a whole is full of energy, passion, and intelligence, but when our design team took a holistic look at our marketing materials we saw many things we could improve upon. Our visual identity lacked that vibrant energy of our community - and overall we lacked a consistent and cohesive aesthetic.
Refreshing the brand
I played a big role in selling our internal team on what a redesign could bring to Tableau and in turn pitching those ideas to external approvers and executives. My ability to dream big, while staying focused on the details, really helped when it came time to unify our design systems. I'm proud to have helped refine our corporate logo, introduce a fresh new color palette, and create an entire library of assets to ensure this brand system can scale for years to come.
REFINED THE LOGO
Even though it may look similar, this new Tableau logo was one of the centerpieces of this brand unification. After some fun attempts at creating alternate new logos - we decided to maintain the bridge between our old brand and revamp everything around the logo. To achieve this, I led the effort to refine the geometry and composition of the "sparkle" icon, as well as ensuring the logo mark worked in combination with our new color palette.
A BRIGHTER COLOR PALETTE + TONES
One thing we knew we wanted out of this project was a new set of colors to build from. Many people agreed that our past colors felt dull, muted, and didn't resonate with the tone of our marketing messages. To solve this I helped create a set of six new colors as well as tones and shades to compliment them. One of the UX Design managers described the new logo and colors best by saying, "it looks like our logo spent the winter in the gym and came out ready for summer looking great!"
INDIGO AS A CORE BRAND COLOR
The rich indigo color has character on its own, but importantly, it also allows the other six brand colors to vividly stand out against it. For several years our Art Director had infused indigo into our Tableau Conference branding and to help refine executive keynote presentations, so suddenly when we had the chance to tweak our corporate color palette, we jumped at the opportunity to define a consistent value and make it a staple of our identity.
VIZ ART AS A GRAPHIC ELEMENT
“Viz art” is a term our team established as an abstract representation of data visualization. It isn't a replica of our product, but more alludes to what you could do with our product. Viz Art is often used as a background texture to create visual interest connecting our product and our messaging. I helped define rules for the styling, patterns, line weights, and treatments to add another element to our design tool kit.
NEW CORPORATE ICON LIBRARY
Supporting the rest of the brand unification, I took on the task of creating over 200 icons to be used across our marketing materials, website, and presentations. The icons are constructed from a consistent grid and built with flexible line weights, allowing the entire system to be able to scale as new icons or variants like hover states, fill colors, or thicker weights are introduced.
PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY LIBRARY
To round out the entire suite of design assets I helped art direct, photograph, and organize an image library to be used across all our marketing materials. These photos were shot in our gorgeous Seattle offices with a diverse set of employees to help alleviate the need for stock photography and ensure our designs feel authentic and approachable.
Building the system
SIMPLE, SMART, AND SCALEABLE
With all the tools in place to design from, I then helped build a graphic system to ensure our marketing materials always looked and felt like Tableau. The foundation is simple, but with time the look has become a foundation for our visual identity.
By combining a core background color with data viz art as a graphic texture in the background we are able to create a design that alludes to data, but also carry the friendly smart tone of our brand. This all works to support a well-written headline and capture the audience’s attention as they scroll through their feeds or browse online.
Bringing it all to life
With all the foundational pieces in place and many "final_final_v3" files saved to the cloud, we were ready to ship our new brand system. To support the rollout of the new identity, I helped design a new advertising style guide, corporate business cards, social templates, icon library, photography library, and presentation templates.
Lessons Learned
CONSISTENCY IS KEY
Everything in this project was grounded in the idea of creating consistent elements that could scale. Establishing rules, a design language, and creating templates was a huge lift, but in the long run, it all ensures the team and brand stay consistent.
MAKE AN IMPACT
Our design team was able to advocate for this brand redesign and, in the long run, prove that our ideas can have a huge impact on our company. From all these efforts, we have seen engagement in our ads, social media, and website all increase over time.
© 2021 Matt Knorr. All Rights Reserved.