CASE STUDY 01 / BRAND STRATEGY + CREATIVE DIRECTION + PRODUCTION
New Relic Brand Transformation
Strategic creative lead and program architect for a full-scale B2B enterprise brand refresh, from research and audit to a design system and org-wide enablement framework
Outcomes at a Glance
Achieved #1 Share of Voice position globally in quarter following launch
New homepage benchmarked in the top tier for Clarity and Motivation against key competitors, driven by 86% first-time visitors
Competitive analysis confirmed clarity as the engagement north star, with a 76% positive correlation to visitor engagement
Social followers up 45% Q/Q and engagement rate up 13% Q/Q post-launch
The annual hybrid campaign generated 73 global articles, 38M+ readers, and 113.5k social impressions
The Challenge
New Relic had brand recognition. What it didn’t have was brand conviction. Relics missed the ol’ days of irreverence, technicality, and Data Nerds. Customers saw the product as a tool that “just existed.” The identity had accumulated over years without a cohesive visual system, a differentiated voice, or a clear point of view that could carry across the customer journey.
Years of accumulated decisions had left the identity without a cohesive visual system, a differentiated voice, or a clear point of view that could carry consistently across the customer journey. And the industry was moving fast. New Relic was shipping products for the AI-native era. The brand needed to catch up.
For a brand team, that kind of gap is a golden opportunity. In an industry moving toward AI-native everything, the question isn’t whether your product can keep up. It's whether your brand can hold space for being authentically technical, genuinely forward, and still unmistakably yours.
The Ask
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Brand Equity
Understand what the existing brand had earned, what was working, and what was holding it back.
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Vision
Define a clear direction for where New Relic was going and what the brand needed to say to get there.
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Infrastructure
Build the tools, templates, and systems to make the new brand real across every team and touchpoint.
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AI Integration
Build AI into the brand process from the start, unlocking creative possibilities a lean team couldn’t reach otherwise.
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Scalability
Enable every team to produce on-brand work independently, so creative could focus on higher-impact strategic work.
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Activation
Launch in phases, prioritizing the highest-impact touchpoints first and building toward full org-wide rollout over time.
Brand Guidelines: A self-service playbook covering brand pillars, voice, tone, color, imagery direction, and visual territories. Written for every team, not just designers, so anyone producing content could make confident on-brand decisions without routing through the creative team.
The Process
Research and Audit
Built the strategic foundation: mapped brand equity, identified gaps, and defined future vision.
Led brand research with agency partner Fathom & Hatch, interviewing executive leadership, customers, and long-tenured employees to surface equity, gaps, and opportunity
Synthesized findings, defined brand positioning, voice architecture, and competative inputs
Ran org-wide audit across marketing, sales, and product touchpoints to establish a baseline and identify inconsistencies at scale
Design and AI Imagery
Translate strategy into a scalable system, directing both hands-on craft and AI tooling to get there.
Define the look & feel across identity, color, typography, imagery, and design language
Directed AI imagery system in partnership with agency The Supervisors. Guided theming, iterative prompting refinement, and oversaw delivery of a scalable low-poly image library. Read full case study here.
Creative direction and workflow operations across full brand ecosystem
Brand Infrastructure
Build a connected system of tools, templates, and docs designed for self-service adoption at org scale.
Build Figma design system and tokenized variables, establishing component architecture in partnership with internal team and agency
Developed brand guidelines covering voice, tone, color, typography, and illustration direction, built for self-service org-wide
Implemented Figma Buzz with social and promotional templates for growth, field, and content marketing, freeing core brand team for strategic work
Architected Brandfolder structure and managed asset distribution, including org onboarding
Rollout and Enablement
Launched brand across six workstreams with phased hand-offs and ongoing, interative enablement.
Mapped phased rollout timeline across six parallel workstreams with structured review gates for cross-functional partners including marketing, sales, product, and people
Produced New Relic Advance hybrid virtual event (Feb ’26), including E2E campaign, keynote presentations, run of show, virtual experience, and on-site creative direction
Delivered Google Slides v1 to marketing leadership (Jan ’26), iterated to v2 for full org rollout (Mar ’26), reaching every cross-functional team simultaneously
Echo Design System: The pattern library underlying the full site, covering color tokens, typography scale, and component architecture. Because this was a brand refresh rather than a rebrand, the system built on existing components while introducing refined global styles, updated color variables, and tightened type alignment to bring everything into coherence with the new identity. Applied at launch across the full newrelic.com ecosystem.
This AI imagery system was designed from the ground up to be replicable by non-designers. Together with our agency partner The Supervisors, we translated visual direction into a production brief, refined the style through iterative prompting, and delivered a library of low-poly illustrations any team member could deploy on-brand, independently. Read about the full process, including how we built the tooling and trained the prompts below.
On brand_by default ✦
Low poly. High signal_ ✦
Prompted to scale_ ✦
On brand_by default ✦ Low poly. High signal_ ✦ Prompted to scale_ ✦
The Brand, Live at Scale
When the 2026 AI Impact Report launched, it needed to do two things at once: communicate findings from 6M+ users with technical precision, and land with enough clarity to stop a scroll. The campaign delivered across social, landing page, and email, all pulled from the same modular system built in Figma Buzz.
That modular system is what makes scale possible. The Observer, customer proof point campaigns, and event promos are all architected the same way, with interchangeable content inputs, locked brand variables, and no dependency on the core creative team to produce.
The Brand system live at scale. The new homepage was built around a single north star: make it immediately clear what New Relic does, why it's different, and why it matters now. Creative direction was informed by AI-assisted competitive benchmarking across Datadog, Dynatrace, and Splunk, identifying a 76% positive correlation between clarity and visitor engagement. The color system was deliberately pulled from the product UI to create continuity between the marketing site and the platform itself. The homepage, navigation, and global styles launched March 2026 as phase one of a full site refresh, the platform and product pages are currently underway and will follow by early Q3.
The Outcome
The brand launched across six parallel workstreams in March 2026, reaching every cross-functional team simultaneously. What started as a brand refresh became a full operating system: a design system, a content infrastructure, guidelines, and a self-service toolkit any team could use to produce on-brand work independently.
The homepage launched with creative direction informed by AI-assisted competitive benchmarking, with clarity identified as the primary driver of visitor engagement. The color system was pulled directly from the product UI, creating continuity between the marketing site and the platform.
In the same period, New Relic was named a leader in the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide AIOps and recognized as a Gartner AI Vision leader. The brand refresh was cited internally as a meaningful signal of the company’s evolution.
The new look and feel, in motion. Social sizzle directed by Dan Marcus and Evan Chung, motion by Trevor Hubbard.
Scope of Work
Strategy
Audit
Research
Brand narrative
Brand positioning
Executive and cross-functional alignment
Creative Ops
Briefing
Prioritization
AI-enabled production workflows
Program management
Agency management
Budget management
Approval governance
Design
Creative direction
Figma design system, components, variables, tokens
AI imagery system and prompt library
Brand, voice + tone guidelines
Editorial and campaign
Collateral templates
Tradeshow booths
Enablement
Figma Buzz template system
Brand playbook and guidelines
Field and GTM toolkits
Google Slides presentation templates
Brandfolder structure and asset distribution
Org onboarding and brand office hours
Activation
New Relic Advance
Live and virtual event Experience
Keynote presentations
Phased org-wide brand launch