Excel Your KPIs with AI Copilot Start for free today

The Story of Kyligence Brand Refresh

Author
Muyun Xiao
Senior User Experience Design Manager
Feb. 14, 2022
 
kyligence new brand
 

Since the second half of 2021, the design team of Kyligence initiated a brand refresh project to completely refresh the company's brand.

 

With the brand refresh being officially announced eventually on Jan 19. Now, I think it would be an excellent time to give you an inside look at how it was conducted to achieve three fundamental values Kyligence brings to its customers: global, trustworthy, and digital.

 

Why a brand refresh?

 

Although Kyligence had an existing identity, our team constantly felt that the brand needed a refresh to reflect how an increasing number of customers adopted our products globally, and our profound understanding of their needs and expectations of us. So it is perfect timing to revisit and revise our look. To start with, here are a few issues we identified:

 
Kyligence legacy logo
 
  • The overall look of the logo is a bit complex. Kyligence is a long word, and the overall letter glyphs are messy. The graphic logo has three colors.
  • The logo shape is a bit childish with its rounded curves.
  • Can't be used without the graphic logo as it's visually imbalanced.
  • The color is too dull to use in a digital context.
 

Initially, the design team made efforts to patch up our existing branding. However, the more we tackled it, the more we realized the fundamental weaknesses were holding us back. We needed a clear set of values and a refreshed identity to express the significance of our offering better. As a lean team, we understood that the efforts of complete brand refresh would be a stretch, but if we were ever going to do it, now was the time. Our mission was to upgrade the company's look around one core brand story, form stronger connections with our audience, and provide a solid foundation for future growth.

 

The keywords of our brand

 

The design team started the brand refresh project by immersively learning what Kyligence has already achieved and what we're moving towards from our employee, customer, and senior management team. We leveraged the company's principles and protocols, the recently updated mission and vision, and also connected to employees to gather opinions on how every team member would describe our values. Lastly, in close collaboration with the management team, we came up with three key words that the new look should reflect:

 
Kyligence keywords
 

Global

Since day one, Kyligence has had the vision to be a global tech company. We now have customers in the US, Europe, South East, Middle East, and we're still accelerating the process of globalization.

 

Trustworthy

Providing trustworthy enterprise-grade products and services and transforming the user needs into standard products are essential to our success.

 

Digital

Kyligence's mission is to enable enterprises to achieve their digital transformation. Digitization is the gene that we are born with, and also our company's key value that we would communicate constantly.

 

The Result

 

With the core keywords of our brand confirmed, we moved quickly and began conceptual design sprints with tight timelines to meet. After three rounds of discussion and review with the senior management team, we narrowed down to the following direction to reflect and communicate our values —'Global, Trustworthy, and Digital'.

 
Kyligence new brand reveal gif
 

The graphic logo basically remains unchanged to tell the same brand story. The 9 moving cubes represent the trend of connection and convergence.

 
Kyligence convergence and connection
 

Connection: Connect the most valuable data

Kyligence's intelligent data cloud platform helps enterprises intelligently manage their most valuable data by providing unified and governed data marts, which break down data silos and organically connect data distributed everywhere.

 

Convergence: Bring global enterprises together

In the past six years, Kyligence has had customers in financial services, manufacturing, retail, and other industries worldwide. Throughout this journey, we continue to explore, research, and polish our products and services to create value for more enterprises. We select a new sans-serif, all-capital character style for the text logo. It reflects the minimalist, modern and digitized brand style. It also presents Kyligence's trustworthy image to customers around the world.

 
Kyligence sans
 

We select a new sans-serif, all-capital character style for the text logo. It reflects the minimalist, modern and digitized brand style. It also presents Kyligence's trustworthy image to customers around the world.

 

A set of new brand colors were also introduced:

  • Kyligence Navy represents the calm and trustworthy side of the company's brand
  • Kyligence Blue embodies the digitized and technological attributes of the big data industry to which it belongs
  • Kyligence Coral shows the company's culture of being proactive, innovating, and always ready for challenges
 
Kyligence color
 
Kyligence color palette
 

We also introduced customized fonts - Kyligence Sans. "Open-source" is where Kyligence is rooted, and the spirit of open-source is reflected in all aspects of the company. Kyligence Sans is an open-source font based on the SIL OFL, Apache License, Version 2.0 license. It also adheres to the open-source spirit that we have consistantly implemented.

 
Kyligence sans
 
Kyligence sans design
 

In terms of font design, we combined the advantages of Siyuan Heiti and Redhat Display in Chinese and Western characters and fine-tuned based on the visual cues in the logo glyph to create a more coherent brand experience for Kyligence. Everyone is welcome to download and leverage our new open-source font here.

 

The upgraded product experience design

 
Kyligence product design
 

We've also made a comprehensive experience upgrade to our products. "Clear," "Natural," and "Efficient" are the three keywords we set as the design goals of this revision. A unified design system was also introduced for all product lines.

 

The redesigned website

 
Kyligence website redesign
 

We introduced a new website design that aligns with our new brand visual. In addition to visual refresh, we have added the latest product introductions, solutions for different scenarios and industries, and customer case stories from various industries, all of which can be accessed with ease on our official website. Intelligently Manage Your Most Valuable Data | Kyligence

 
 

To go back to our initial reasons for revising our visual identity — previously, we felt the old Kyligence branding ended up being overly childish, complex, and undigitized. We addressed all of these issues with this refresh - from a digitized, modern, and trustworthy logo to a friendlier color palette for digital usage. We're confident our new identity will provide Kyligence a foundation to keep growing in the long term. It has already been embraced enthusiastically by all internal teams, and we can only hope our customers will welcome the change as well.

 
Kyligence giveaway design
 

Who is Kyligence?

 

Kyligence Inc. is the world's leading intelligence company focused on big data analytics technology innovation. Founded by the team who created Apache Kylin, the top open source OLAP for Big Data Apache project, Kyligence offers solutions for both on-premises and Cloud Big Data analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) environments that includes Kyligence Enterprise, Kyligence Cloud, and Kyligence Insight. Today, Kyligence's solutions power the analytics work of industry leaders and Global Fortune 500 companies like China Mobile, China Unicom, China UnionPay, China Pacific Insurance Group, Huawei, OPPO, and SAIC. Dual headquartered in San Jose, California, USA and Shanghai, China, Kyligence has strong backing from leading VCs, including Redpoint, Cisco, China Broadband Capital, Shunwei Capital, Coatue, and Eight Roads Ventures (the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International Limited).

 

TEST DRIVE TODAY with $300 worth of free usage

test drive customer logo