Building a brand system that scales with the company

Camunda · B2B SaaS · Process orchestration

2021 — 2026

Brand strategy · Systems design · Creative leadership · Design ops · Cross-functional enablement

I joined Camunda as a Graphic Designer in 2021. Five years later I own the brand: its system, its guidelines, its governance, and the people who execute it. This is the story of how that happened, and what I built along the way.

When I arrived, the visual identity was a year old. A new logo, a gradient polygon system, clean at launch and already at its limit. Everything was starting to look the same. The abstract backgrounds left no room for variation, the two-tone color system muddied recognition, and there was no underlying logic that could scale to a 600-person remote team, a global developer community, or a flagship conference.

A full rebrand was the wrong answer. The bones were good. What was missing was a system.

The real problem

The brand wasn't broken, it was brittle. It worked in one designer's hands, but fell apart everywhere else.
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‍The brief said refresh. The real problem was that Camunda had a brand and not a brand system: no framework flexible enough for 600+ employees to apply on their own, without a designer in the room. My job was to make it durable.

Same campaign, refreshed. Left: the competitive guide ad on the old gradient system. Right: the same guide rebuilt on the brand system, 2023.

The stakes

I launched the system in February 2022, which turned out to be Camunda's most complex brand year on record. Four things happened at once:
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A new product launch (Camunda 8)
The first hybrid CamundaCon
A go-to-market pivot to PLG and SLG motions
The start of a new market category (process orchestration)

A brittle brand does not survive a year like that. A system does. It held through all of it and kept scaling from there. That is the entire case for systems thinking over polish.

My role

I initiated and led this project from day one, working directly with the VP of Brand on the initial strategy and rollout. Over time I became the sole owner of the guidelines: their evolution, adoption, and governance.

The guidelines became my management tool. They were the brief and the standard I used to direct junior designers, freelancers, and external agencies, so the brand could scale without me redoing the work. To date I have released five versions, each shaped by direct feedback from the people using them.

What I built

One principle ran the whole system: beautiful, functional, and meaningful. Every decision had to serve all three.

I audited the existing brand and made three calls: keep what worked (the IBM Plex Sans typeface, the logo), simplify what was fighting itself, and build the rest from scratch.
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Gradient complexity simplified to a single signature color, applied to the logo within app icons, slide decks, and favicon.

The decisions that mattered, and why:

Color. I collapsed two competing hues into a single signature orange, anchored by black and white. That opened a wider, more flexible range of accent colors and made the brand instantly recognizable. Recognition stopped depending on the designer.
Graphic language. I tied the visual elements directly to Camunda's own product logic: process nodes, orchestration flows. The design language became functional rather than decorative. It meant something.
The modular frame system. Every touchpoint got a recognizable signature without everything looking identical. Consistent, not uniform.

Brand guidelines at a glance: From color and typography to accessibility, patterns, photography, and brand characters. Five versions released since 2021, with each iteration refining and expanding what came before.

Then I moved the brand into a single source of truth in Figma: three interconnected libraries covering brand foundations, icons, and web components. The point was never the tooling. The point was that a team of internal and external designers could move fast without breaking the brand, collaborate in real time, and gather feedback without version confusion. The brand stopped living in scattered local files and email chains.

Figma design system: Three interconnected libraries covering brand foundations, icons, and web components, built so any designer could move fast without breaking the brand.

The highest-leverage deliverable was the one nobody expects: the branded Google Slides template. It is used daily by marketing, sales, and senior leadership for internal alignment, external pitches, and conference presentations seen by thousands. The social team gained the ability to produce on-brand graphics on their own, in Slides or Figma, without routing through design.

Adoption was built into delivery: a launch session and Q&A, everything published in the company handbook, and a Google Drive any employee could navigate regardless of design background.

Brand system applied across social, demand gen, content, product, and events.

How it evolved

The system was never meant to be static. I established an annual brand audit rhythm with the creative team and used CamundaCon as a testing ground for new creative directions. The strongest experiments from the event got evaluated and, if they held, folded into the core system. The brand stayed current without losing its foundation.

When I noticed the slide template had gaps, I did not guess at the fix. I ran a structured feedback survey across departments and seniority levels, including the co-founder. That input shaped the v3.3 release directly: better functionality, an expanded palette, refinements driven by real usage instead of designer assumptions.

Five versions over four years. Each one a response to how the brand was actually being used. The system evolved while the foundation held.

Brand Guidelines release notes, v3.3 to v3.5: Five versions released over four years, each one a response to how the brand was actually being used. The system evolved while the foundation held.

Outcome

600

Employees

enabled to use the brand independently across the entire org including marketing, sales, and senior leadership

Brand Impact Score growth

37 in Q1 2022 to 57 in Q1 2025 tracked externally by Insight Partners

Versions

of the guidelines shipped over 4 years, each driven by audit and feedback

YoY total social engagement

in year one, despite a platform-wide impressions decline during Twitter's 2022 instability

YoY video views

across LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. YouTube likes more than doubled; highest video output

The brand system was launched in February 2022, which happened to be Camunda's most complex brand year. With a new product launch (Camunda 8), the first hybrid CamundaCon, a GTM pivot to PLG and SLG motions, and the start of a new market category, the brand system held through all of it, and kept scaling from there.

The brand wasn't broken when I got there. It just couldn't leave the room without me. Now it does, every day, in 600+ pairs of hands.

Brand Impact Score, Q1 2022 to Q1 2025. Tracked externally by Insight Partners across awareness, engagement, perception, power of voice, and employee sentiment. Every dimension up, every year.

Teaching the org to think in brand

By 2026 the highest-leverage work had changed shape. It was no longer about making the brand. It was about getting the whole org aligned on what it means.

At the marketing offsite in Iceland, April 2026, I built and led "Brand in 3 Layers," a workshop disguised as an icebreaker. Teams of three to five had to define what brand is, describe how Camunda shows up today, and sketch it. The warm-up framing was deliberate. Underneath it, the exercise was discovery: it surfaced how differently people across marketing understood the same brand, in their own words, before anyone had a chance to defend a position.

The workshop structure I built and led at the marketing offsite. Brand in 3 Layers: define it, describe us, sketch it, share out. A warm-up on the surface, a brand alignment diagnostic underneath.

The premise I opened with: if the people who run marketing can't agree on what the Camunda brand means, we can't expect prospects to. Internal alignment is the precondition for external clarity, not a nice-to-have after the fact.

It was rated one of the top 5 sessions of the offsite. The rating was the easy part to point at. What mattered more: the output became real input for the brand evolution, and a room full of non-designers left thinking about brand as something they own a piece of.

The share-out in progress: surfacing how differently one brand reads across the org, before anyone defended a position.

Directing the brand's next chapter

The workshop fed something bigger. I am currently leading Camunda's brand evolution with the external agency Baunfire, the most senior brand mandate I have held. At the same offsite, I presented the initiative to the marketing team, making the case for why a rebrand matters now and what is at stake if we get the foundation wrong.

My role is direction, not production. I manage the agency relationship, steer the work through discovery and strategy, and shape decisions alongside a cross-functional tiger team, the marketing leadership team, and the CMO. The "Brand in 3 Layers" output went straight into that discovery, so the rebrand started from how the org understands the brand rather than from a blank brief.

This is the role arc closing its loop. I started as the designer applying the brand. Five years on, I am the person directing where it goes next, with executive leadership in the room and an agency executing to my direction.