Colony Logic: The Whole Package

Colony Logic had no brand, five products in flight and one year. I treated brand identity and product interfaces as a single system rather than sequential projects, so the logos, the style guidelines and five product UIs were all designed in the same conversation. It took four Hermes Creative Awards in 2015: Best Branding Initiative, Best UI Design, Best Explainer Video and Best Responsive Website Design.

Colony Logic was an early-stage mobile SaaS startup in Los Angeles with no brand, several products in flight and a tight timeline. The company needed brand identity, UX strategy across the product suite, polished UI and an award-caliber marketing campaign, all at once rather than in sequence.

The product suite alone was a year of work: the core CLX SaaS platform, the FlightPath reporting dashboard, the Swarm sales tool, the Harvest logistics app and the Honeycomb data integration product. Each had to feel like a sibling of the others.

As Creative Director I owned the whole visual system for Colony Logic: the parent brand, the CLX platform and the four products built on it, the website, the launch campaign and the explainer film. The call that made it work was running brand and product UI as one conversation rather than two projects, so every interface decision fed the brand language and the brand language fed the next interface.

I ran the whiteboard brand exploration and the style guide, then built the personas, user flows, site maps, storyboards and wireframes on the product side. I worked most closely with the COO, and with the creative partners who produced the campaign film, through bi-weekly scrums on JIRA.

The engagement started with high-level creative and marketing planning with stakeholders, then whiteboard brand exploration and style-guide work: the logo system, the palette and the voice that every product would inherit. Bi-weekly scrums tracked on JIRA kept brand and product work moving in parallel.

On the product side I validated requirements first, then built personas, user flows, site maps, storyboards and wireframes before moving into visual design. Video production ran alongside, because the explainer film had to tell the same story the five product interfaces did.

The defining decision was treating brand and product UI as one system rather than sequential projects. Every interface decision fed the brand language and vice versa, which is why five products launched feeling like one family.

The other bet was investing in a high-quality explainer video and campaign materials alongside the product work, even under timeline pressure. That was polish a pure product schedule would have cut.

Keeping brand and product design in the same conversation produced coherence that pure product work often misses. Four Hermes awards confirmed the bet on running brand and product in one conversation.