CASE STUDY 02 / 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 but was lacking brand conviction. Relics missed the ol’ days of irreverence, technicality, and forever loved Data Nerds. Customers saw the product as a tool that just existed. Over the years, the identity lacked a cohesive visual system, a differentiated voice, and a clear point of view across the customer journey. And as the industry moves with an AI-native era, the New Relic brand needed to catch up.
For us as a brand team, this industry-created gap became a golden opportunity. We were tasked with defining a brand that was authentically technical, AI-forward, and still unmistakably ours.
The Brief
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Brand Equity
Understand what the existing New Relic brand owned. Define what’s working, and what’s holding it back.
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Vision
Define the strategy and narrative for where the business is going and what the brand needed to say to get there.
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Infrastructure
Build the roadmap, design systems, framework to actualize a new brand across every team and touchpoint.
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AI Integration
Build AI into the brand process from the start, unlocking creative possibilities for a lean team and global org.
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Scalability
Enable the org to self-service on-brand assets, so the in-house brand studio can focus on high-impact strategic work.
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Activation
Launch in phases, prioritizing business-driven touchpoints 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 and external vendors to empower independent on-brand decisions. Content written by Sean Finney and Antoniah Brown.
The Process
Research and Audit
Build the strategic foundation: map brand equity, identify gaps, and define 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 competitive inputs
Ran org-wide audit across marketing, sales, and product to establish a baseline and identify inconsistencies at scale
Presented audit findings and strategic roadmap to C-suite executives, address feedback and resolve key concerns
Design and AI Imagery
Translate strategy into a scalable system, directing both hands-on craft and AI tooling to get there.
Define look & feel across identity, color, typography, imagery, and design language
Direct 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 operationalize workflow and activation across brand ecosystem
Brand Infrastructure
Build a connected system of tools, templates, and docs designed for self-service adoption at scale.
Drive and test Figma design system and tokenized variables, establishing component architecture in partnership with internal brand team with agency support
Oversee brand guidelines covering voice, tone, color, typography, and illustration direction, built for self-service org-wide
Procure and implement Figma Buzz with social and promotional templates for growth, field, and content marketing, freeing core brand team for strategic work
Architect Brandfolder structure and managed org-wide asset distribution
Rollout and Enablement
Launch brand across six workstreams with phased hand-offs and ongoing, iterative enablement.
Map phased rollout timeline across six parallel workstreams with structured review gates for cross-functional partners including marketing, sales, product, and talent acquisition
Produce New Relic Advance hybrid virtual global event (Feb ’26), including end-to-end campaign, keynote presentations, run of show, virtual experience, and on-site creative direction
Deliver Google Slides v1 to marketing leadership (Jan ’26), with v2 for full rollout (Mar ’26) reaching every org team and external agency partner
Echo Design System: The foundational pattern library powering the newrelic.com ecosystem—covering color tokens, typography scale, and component architecture. Positioned as a brand refresh rather than a complete rebrand, the system evolved existing components by introducing refined global styles, updated color variables, and tightened typographic alignment to create unified brand coherence. Designed in partnership with Design Director Dan Marcus and agency support.
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 Relic could apply 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 both communicate findings from 6M+ users with technical precision and land with enough clarity to stop a scroll. The campaign shipped across social, web, and email, all from the same modular Figma Buzz system.
This modular system is what makes scale possible and manageable. For example, the Observer, customer proof point campaigns, and event promos are all architected similarly in Figma Buzz, 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
Launched across six parallel workstreams in March 2026, the refresh evolved from a visual update into an evolving brand operating system, including design systems, content infrastructure, governance guidelines, and self-service toolkits that empowered internal and external teams to create confidently.
The redesigned homepage leveraged AI-assisted competitive benchmarking to anchor creative direction around visitor engagement. To better resonate with our technical audience, we sought a more apparent visual continuity between marketing and platform by grounding the site’s color palette and design language in New Relic’s product UI.
Coinciding with New Relic’s recognition as an IDC MarketScape Leader in AIOps and a Gartner AI Vision Leader, the brand refresh was celebrated internally as a pivotal signal of the company’s strategic, AI-forward 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