Over the past few months, our design team has gone through one of the most intense, insightful, and collective processes we’ve experienced within the company. As our product portfolio expanded and Dot opened new doors for us, it became increasingly clear that our existing brand identity was no longer capable of carrying us forward. Our products were evolving, accelerating, and diversifying — yet our brand was still framed within an outdated container.
This realization placed us right at the heart of a comprehensive rebranding process. In this article, I want to share the journey we went through as a team, and the thinking behind the new brand language we ultimately crafted.
Why Rebranding? A Question Raised at the Design Table
The first thing we noticed as a design team was that our visual identity was struggling to keep up with our new product strategy. We needed a brand that offered consistency across every touchpoint, while also providing a flexible architecture that could clearly define the relationship between Novus and Dot. Additionally, a more thoughtful and future-ready brand strategy was essential to carry both products into their next phases of growth. All of these components were critical not only for the future of Novus but also for the evolving ecosystem surrounding Dot.
The First Step: Research and Discovery
When we embarked on this journey, we asked ourselves a simple but defining question: “What does our brand represent today, and what should it represent tomorrow?” To answer this, we conducted a broad and detailed brand audit. We examined the competitive landscape, analyzed user perceptions, evaluated our long-term product plans, and carefully reviewed all existing brand assets — from our logo and color palette to typography and UI language. We also assessed the level of adaptability our new and upcoming products required. This discovery phase shaped the strategic framework that guided every decision throughout the rebranding.
Brand Camp: Learning Together, Week by Week
We established a weekly collaborative environment that allowed us to work in an iterative and exploratory rhythm. During what we call “Brand Camp,” we experimented extensively with AI tools, generated hundreds of rapid prototypes, and explored a wide range of stylistic directions. Every team member contributed unique visual ideas, which created a dynamic environment where experimentation became second nature. Each week balanced fast-paced production with equally fast-paced refinement, and through this process, we discovered the true potential of AI as part of our design workflow. Some weeks brought clarity instantly, while others challenged us to rethink our assumptions — yet every iteration brought us closer to a brand that genuinely represents us.
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Branding Workshop: The Design Team + The Entire Company at One Table
A brand is not created solely by designers; it is shaped and lived by the entire organization. With that belief, we organized a company-wide branding workshop. Through gamified activities and open discussions, we gathered insights from colleagues across departments and explored how the brand was perceived versus how it should be perceived. Listening to perspectives from product, sales, marketing, operations, and other teams helped us build a more holistic understanding of our brand’s strengths and opportunities. This workshop became a turning point, as it allowed us to blend the design team’s vision with the collective voice of the entire company.
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Strategic Foundations: Values, Story, and Purpose
A strong design process needs a strong strategic backbone. Using insights from both the workshop and our research, we rebuilt the core elements of our brand strategy. We defined a new set of brand values that reflect who we are: human-centric, collaborative, democratic, analytical, efficient, and adaptive. From there, we shaped our brand purpose. For Novus, our purpose is to offer AI as an ethical, accessible, and powerful tool for humanity. For Dot, it is to transform corporate work into a world where ideas have no limits and work is efficient, collaborative, and oriented around teams. This strategic foundation served as the compass for every visual and architectural decision that followed.
Brand Architecture: The New Relationship Between Novus and Dot
As our products grew in number and complexity, we needed a brand architecture that could scale alongside them. We adopted a House of Brands approach that clarifies how Novus and Dot relate visually and conceptually. In this structure, Dot can inherit key visual qualities from Novus, creating harmony across the ecosystem, while still having room to develop its own stylistic variations when needed. This model ensures that future products can be introduced and positioned sustainably without diluting the clarity of our brand.
Visual Identity: Rebuilding the Core of the Brand
With the strategy firmly established, we moved on to redesigning our visual world — a phase defined by intense exploration and refinement. We rebuilt our primary and secondary logos, grounding Novus in the ideas of dynamism, liquidity, and flexibility, and shaping Dot around simplicity, inclusivity, curiosity, efficiency, and collaboration. We also design a new font dedicated to Novus: Rings & Strips for expressive display moments. Our color palette was revised and expanded to provide greater depth and adaptability. Finally, we developed a new visual style that draws from kinetic halftones, dot-based structures, blurred textures, and inspirations from Bauhaus, Futurism, and 90s postmodernism. This visual world now extends across every communication channel — from social media to blog covers and beyond.
The Reality of Rebranding: The “This Is It!” Moment After Hundreds of Iterations
Rebranding is not about decorating the first version of an idea. It requires stripping away what is merely good in order to uncover what is truly meaningful. Week after week, we reviewed our work internally, tested new ideas, removed unnecessary elements, and pushed ourselves to build a cleaner and more intentional visual system. Eventually, we reached a point where every member of the team felt aligned — a shared sense that “This is the brand that will carry us into the future.”
Our New Identity: Innovative, Human-Centric, Dynamic
Today, our renewed brand stands as a flexible, scalable, modern, and deeply human-centric identity. It embodies data-driven thinking, future-oriented design, and a vision that resonates with where we are headed. This rebrand is far more than a visual refresh; it represents a holistic transformation of our company culture, product philosophy, and long-term strategic direction.
Final Words
This rebrand would not have been possible without the creativity, courage, and disciplined mindset of our design team. The hundreds of small outputs produced week after week ultimately came together to form a meaningful and cohesive transformation. As we rebuilt our brand, we didn’t just refine aesthetics — we redefined who we are and where we want to go. The new Novus and Dot identities capture the collective spirit behind this journey. And this is only the beginning.
