AudioEye had become a software company, yet customers were being asked to trust a platform that looked like a service offering.
The stakes
The business had moved from manual accessibility audits and remediation sold to enterprise companies toward automated software sold to small businesses, but the brand hadn't moved with it. What I inherited was dated, corporate, and looked like everyone else in the category. Avenir ships on every Mac, so it belonged to nobody. The logo carried eight colors with no clear primary. The illustrations came from a stock pack anyone could license.
The buyer had changed underneath all of it and nothing in the system was ours to claim. We needed a brand that read as current software and that no competitor could buy off the shelf. The CEO wanted it to go live within the month and I had never rebranded a publicly traded company before.
The background
A month wasn't enough time to do a rebrand properly. So I scoped this one as a bridge and said so out loud. That meant putting a deliberately temporary identity on a publicly traded company, across investor materials and every customer touchpoint, knowing no one would judge it as temporary.
Waiting was the worse option. Every month the brand lagged behind the business was another month of selling software while looking like a consultancy. To move that fast I brought on Nightswim, a design partner led by Ryan Kelly. We'd worked together at Uncorked Studios, so I knew his pace and he knew mine.
My role
I was Creative Director and Design Lead. I hired the partner, wrote the brief, made the calls, and owned the rollout. February was about showing the product instead of describing it. Score gauges of a real site moving from 62 to 87 in a day, live monitoring output, actual product screens in place of illustrations of them. We left the old identity in place while we did it, on purpose. Proving the argument came before dressing it.
February into March was the identity. I reduced the logo to a single monochrome mark and moved from Avenir to GT America, with GT Mono for data. A category audit showed the field was crowded with blues and greens, so I built the palette around a vibrant purple and cut it from seven colors to four. The brand had to work as interface, not just identity, and the component system is what made it possible.
The results
The identity shipped in a month and rolled out across every customer touchpoint, from the website and product marketing to sales collateral and investor-facing materials.
The 2021 system became the foundation everything since has been built on. I led a second refresh in 2023 that extended it as the product line grew, and a third is underway now in 2026, with the brand strategy and research a one-month sprint never had room for. Five years and two refreshes later, the structure I set in a month is still what we build against.
What I would change
I designed an accessibility brand without involving AudioEye's community of users with disabilities. We met the standard by checking our work rather than by asking the people the standard exists for. That's the change we're making in the 2026 refresh.
I also used purple everywhere, so the color I chose specifically to differentiate became the default and stopped differentiating anything. It should have been reserved for the actions we wanted people to take. And I never set up brand tracking, which means I know the system worked because it lasted, but I can't isolate what the rebrand itself contributed. A baseline survey before and after would have cost almost nothing.
Key takeaway
Brand is usually the last thing to catch up to a business decision, and the gap is where the company loses people who would have bought. Naming a stopgap as a stopgap is what let us move that fast. It held because I built it to be extended rather than finished, which is why two later refreshes could build on it instead of starting over.
The team
Creative Director and Design Lead | Sojin Rank |
Design Partner |