Deel Rebrand
March 2023-March 2024
Role: Principle Brand Designer + Illustrator
Please see full credits at bottom.
In March of 2023 I was 2 years into my tenure at Deel. One year prior we had brought on our new Creative Director, Jolanta Aerts, and after taking stock of the brand, internalizing the varying needs of the orgs within the company, and the pain points with our current brand, we embarked on a rebrand as an internal team. When we started the rebrand Deel was roughly 2000 employees. When we concluded and launched the refreshed brand one year later, our company was at 4000 emplyees.
With the exception of one external consultant (shout out to Michael Moulton), the rebrand was conducted 100% by our internal design team. From initial brand positioning exercises, competitor research, exploration from every member of the team, iteration and fine tuning to the finalized brand launched as a coordinated effort between marketing, product, brand, sales, content and leadership. Read more in depth about the Deel Rebrand.
As the original Brand Designer at Deel, I had the privilege to have a seat at the small table that was steering the rebrand from the onset. My hands were in a number of arenas simultaneously but my largest (and favorite) responsibility was to redefine and scale our illustration system, which had been a firm pillar of the brand from day one, but had become problematic in hypergrowth due to the time intensive and unforgiving nature of the illustration style.
We knew we wanted illustration to remain a large part of the brand as it was continuously communicated to us that our brand brought some much needed optimism to the work of HR tech through our whimsical and iconic illustrations. However, our team was quickly starting to pay the price of basing the entire brand upon a style that was time intensive to produce, and our ambitions to become THE HR platform for enterprise clients was at odds with a style that screamed ‘startup!’
With this in mind we set out to explore a range of styles for the brand visuals that prioritized simplicity, speed of execution, modularity and a seamless integration with other forms of creative, such as photography and UI. We oriented our explorations around our new brand values that had been established earlier in the process and stress tested our ideas under the spotlight of scalability, optimism, diversity, and simplicity.
We landed on a visual style that lifted the strongest elements from our existing brand but elevated and simplified them to be quirkier, more flexible and faster to execute.
Full rebrand Credits: Jolanta Aerts, Jean-Baptiste Di Marco, Tory Van Wey, James Porter, Spencer Gutierrez, Tyler Bradley, Emi Norgaard, Manu Arborelo, Yuwei “Momo” Liu, Cherihan Hassun, Luis Vallejo, Ope Aluko, Ray Hobbs, Kirkland Luther, Bianca Wagner, and Adam Lisbeth.
BTS of the process:
An audit of our original brand circa 2023 (above) allowed us to identify opportunities for improvement. Some of our mid-process explorations for potential creative directions (below).
