The work
Made Neo
- Client
- Rise
- Industry
- Technology
- Date
- September 2024
About Rise
Rise had outgrown the name it launched with, and every asset that came with it.
Five years in, Rise was serving enterprise clients with a brand still built for a seed round. The identity was doing active harm in pitches. We rebuilt it from the positioning outwards rather than starting with a logo.
The challenge we take on
A start-up identity in rooms that had stopped treating them like a start-up.
The visual language read as young, which the sales team was constantly compensating for. But over-correcting into corporate would have cost the culture that made the company worth buying from. The identity had to grow up without flattening out.
The positioning
Neo is not new. It is what comes after new.
We landed the brand on the moment a technology stops being novel and starts being infrastructure. That gave Rise a claim its competitors could not copy without conceding maturity, and gave the identity a job beyond looking modern.
The identity
A system built to be used, not admired.
One typeface, a restrained palette, and a grid that survives being handled by non-designers. The guidelines run to eighteen pages on purpose — everything in them is a decision someone in the company will actually have to make.
KPI
Performance snapshot
+55%
Pitch win rate
Improvement in enterprise deals reaching final-stage selection after relaunch
4wks
Rollout time
From launch to full application across product, sales and recruitment materials
+31%
Inbound applications
Growth in qualified candidate applications in the two quarters following
18
Pages of guidelines
Deliberately short, so the system gets used instead of consulted