Design Bank

Design Bank, based in Durham, NC, provides a collection of interior and landscape design services, along with a retail shop selling mostly midcentury furniture and home goods.

In my role, I collaborated with the Co-Founders to strategically position their two businesses as one, create a new visual style and logo, and seamlessly integrate it across various surfaces—such as their website, storage signage, and business cards.

Glean is a productivity and knowledge management tool that helps modern workers search across theirs apps fast and accurately. In 2022 they raised $100M series C led by Sequoia. The company was swiftly moving upstream to attract enterprise clients, focusing on engineering leaders while also appealing to business teams more broadly. At the time, the team was looking to refine their brand to appear more mature, positioning them as a leader in the market.

As Glean's first Art Director, I firstly audited the existing brand. My research led me to reposition the brand as more visionary, focusing on the intelligence of the product and how it makes users feel. From there the “the sage sidekick" archetype emerged, guiding all design and copy decisions. Building upon the equity established with the logo and primary blue, I introduced textured shapes as a visual metaphor for Glean's core product benefits.

Glean is a productivity and knowledge management tool that helps modern workers search across theirs apps fast and accurately. In 2022 they raised $100M series C led by Sequoia. The company was swiftly moving upstream to attract enterprise clients, focusing on engineering leaders while also appealing to business teams more broadly. At the time, the team was looking to refine their brand to appear more mature, positioning them as a leader in the market.

As Glean's first Art Director, I firstly audited the existing brand. My research led me to reposition the brand as more visionary, focusing on the intelligence of the product and how it makes users feel. From there the “the sage sidekick" archetype emerged, guiding all design and copy decisions. Building upon the equity established with the logo and primary blue, I introduced textured shapes as a visual metaphor for Glean's core product benefits.

The location of the hybrid shop and workspace is an old bank. The marble surface ostensibly became a part of the design language.

A key design principle for Design Bank is ‘collective’, in which all aspects of their business consist of bringing together multiple parts. Therefore, the design system had to reflect: a collection of shapes for the logo, a collection of greens for the palettes, and a collection of graphics for the collages.

The chartreuse color was inspired by plants and mid-century modern color trends, speaking to both founders’ design disciplines.

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