Rebuilding a global brand while the business kept moving
A rebrand is usually presented as a sequence: strategy, identity, system, rollout. I wish ours had been that tidy.
We had a new name, a new brand direction, a new website, and thousands of assets that still had to work across more than 30 countries.
The original deadline was three months. The core creative design team was two designers. So we built the brand while putting it into production.
Together with Zeynep Kalafatçılar, I co-led the creative direction and rollout of Insider’s transformation into Insider One.
My focus was its digital expression: the web experience, visual language, and the foundations of a system that could keep working after launch.
This was not a logo-change project. It was the slightly more complicated task of making a new identity survive contact with a global company.
One global transformation, built by a two-person creative core.
A discoverability problem became an opportunity to tell a clearer company story.
Insider was a strong idea but a difficult name to own. It was shared by publishers, products, and companies across unrelated categories, making brand authority harder to build and SEO investment less efficient. As search expanded into generative engines, we also needed a name that people and machines could connect to one clear entity.
That was the practical reason for becoming Insider One. The bigger opportunity was to present a growing set of products and capabilities as one connected enterprise platform, with one value proposition and one global identity.
The brief started with a name. The real assignment was to change how the company presented - and understood itself.
Focus Lab created the brand with us. We made it work as a MarTech SaaS product.
The brand direction came from Focus Lab, and we worked closely with their team throughout its development. Together, we shaped an identity with expressive typography, confident color, rich imagery, and an editorial point of view.
It had the energy we needed, but it leaned closer to a fashion brand than a global MarTech SaaS company. Our job was to translate that expression into product pages, UI compositions, sales decks, campaigns, event screens, and regional work without sanding off everything interesting.
A brand deck can avoid the ugly questions. Production cannot.
What happens when the copy triples in German?
When UI has to be the hero?
When someone outside design needs to make the next asset tomorrow?
Those questions became our working brief.
We kept the expression and rewrote the rules for a product company.
We built a style guide between the brand guidelines and production. It defined how typography, color, gradients, layout, product composition, imagery, and motion behaved when the context changed.
The main decision was to separate expression from evidence. Conceptual stories could carry atmosphere and visual tension. Product stories kept the interface legible, with the brand framing the UI instead of competing with it.
We also stopped expecting every format to use every ingredient. A campaign could be loud; a dense product page needed restraint; an event screen had three seconds to work from across a room. Recognition would come from shared decisions, not identical layouts.
Obvious after the rules exist. Less obvious while discovering them inside live work.
The design system left the launch plan, but it never left the work.
The design system was initially part of the rebrand scope. As the deadline tightened, it was removed from the launch plan with the intention of returning to it after the brand went live.
On paper, that reduced scope. In production, it was impossible.
Every page introduced recurring layout decisions. Every product visual created a reusable composition. Every development handoff raised the same question: is this a one-off, or the beginning of a pattern?
I disagreed with postponing that thinking, so I kept the essential system layer alive while delivering the rebrand: shared variables, responsive modules, reusable visual structures, and component logic. I went a little too far with it, which is usually how my systems begin.
It was not yet the complete Marketing Design System; the launch left no room to solve its architecture, governance, and libraries properly. But it gave the work a spine. After launch, those foundations became a dedicated system used across web, social, events, product storytelling, and regional production.
If an idea only worked in a brand deck, it was not ready.
We developed the visual language through use. Product interfaces, AI narratives, analyst communications, social content, events, and sales materials all tried to break it in different ways.
We made product UI the proof, not decoration. Interface compositions were built around the point being explained instead of dropped into generic device mockups. Abstract and AI-generated imagery handled conceptual stories without pretending to explain the product.
The strongest rules came from things that failed: a direction collapsed on a dense page, a composition disappeared on an event screen, or a beautiful image said absolutely nothing. We adjusted and kept what survived.
What emerged was not a set of fixed layouts, but a visual grammar capable of different sentences in the same voice.
The website changed identity, architecture, and technology at the same time.
50+ web pages had to explain a wide product ecosystem without feeling like separate brands stitched into one navigation. At the same time, we were leaving a legacy technology stack. This was not a reskin applied to old code; design and development rebuilt the experience together.
I led the website’s UI/UX expression and worked closely with Dev team. I am the kind of designer who inspects the DOM when something feels off. Here, that habit became useful.
We solved component behavior, content variability, responsive rules, and implementation trade-offs while pages were still being designed. Code changed design decisions, and design helped shape the new front-end structure.
Reusable content structures made production faster without forcing every story into the same layout. The website launched the identity and exposed which parts were robust enough to become a system.
Production speed mattered. Repeatability mattered more.
A MarTech company cannot run on one kind of visual. Product teams need interface detail, marketing needs a narrative, sales needs persuasion, analysts need evidence, and events need impact from across a room.
During the rebrand, Zeynep and I created 700+ product visuals and 300+ commercial visuals. Producing them was one challenge. Making them serve different purposes while still looking related was the real one.
At one point, I reskinned more than 350 visuals for our web tools overnight. This is not a sentence I recommend turning into a workflow. It proved that individual speed, however useful in an emergency, was not a production model.
The answer had to be structure. Repeated decisions became reusable compositions, clearer categories, components, and production rules. Each urgent delivery had to reduce the effort required by the next one.
The rebrand began producing two things at once: the work launch needed immediately, and the infrastructure the organization would need afterward.
Generation increased the range. Direction made it ours.
AI was part of production from the beginning. Image-led assets were generated, selected, composed, refined, and directed into a consistent Insider One expression. The useful question was never “Can AI generate this?” It was “Could this belong only to Insider One?”
The workflow became a repeatable loop:
Direction → Prompting → Generation → Selection → Art Direction → Refinement → Systemization
We turned what we learned into a prompt library for designers and non-designers. Constraints around composition, material, lighting, color, and subject matter gave everyone a structured starting point.
Eventually, prompts became documentation. Less exciting than AI magic, which is exactly why it scaled. AI generated material; direction, editing, and the system made it recognizable.
The identity had to travel across countries, languages, formats, and walls.
Insider One operates across more than 30 countries. Layouts had to survive changing copy lengths, templates needed room for regional messages, and the rules had to work far away from the core design team.
Then we took the brand into offices, events, signage, print, and presentation spaces. Physical production is good at exposing fake confidence: a composition that looks perfect on a laptop can disappear on a stage screen or behave very differently on a wall.
For more than 1,500 employees, the identity stopped being a Figma file and became a place they walked into.
The launch moved. The design work kept moving forward.
We began with a three-month deadline and an October 1 launch target. The date changed three times; the global launch finally happened in December.
Our design stream was ready for the original deadline, but a global release is a shared dependency. Content, marketing production, development, and migration needed more time before everything could switch together.
We used the additional months to improve what was ready, pressure-test the language, refine responsive behavior, and absorb new projects into the rebrand. By December, the work had not simply waited for launch. It had become stronger.
Six months of decisions became one visible change.
In December 2025, Insider became Insider One across the website, product stories, campaigns, analyst communications, social channels, presentations, sales materials, events, and offices.
People outside the project did not see the responsive rules, rejected generations, overnight reskins, or the long conversations where design and development solved the same problem from opposite sides. They saw one company, one platform, and one brand. Good. That was the job.
For a two-person creative core, the scale was intense. The achievement was not simply the amount we produced; it was that the work held together - and that after launch, it no longer depended on the two people who had built it to keep looking like itself.
Recognition made the change visible. Operations made it last.
The rebrand delivered a distinct identity, a new 50+ page web experience, more than 1,000 product and commercial visuals, a rollout supporting over 30 countries, and the foundations of the Marketing Design System that followed.
Recognition is when people can identify a brand. Operability is when teams can use it across countries, formats, deadlines, and problems its original designers could not predict.
We could not separate imagining the identity from making it real. Every weakness surfaced early, and every repeated problem pushed us toward a better rule. It was not the process I would design from scratch, but it taught me what a global rebrand requires: taste and structure, direction and translation, a launch and a way for the work to continue afterward.
We made Insider One recognizable. Then we made it operable.