The WP Engine Rebrand.
WP Engine had more than twenty brands in market, some built and some acquired, under a parent aesthetic that still looked like early 2010's stock corporate art. I helped unify under one warm and smart voice, steered towards a human-centered visual language, penned the style guide, defined the product hierarchy, and presented it to the company.
The work
As the single largest host behind the platform powering more than 40% of the open web, WP Engine had grown to cover the whole life of a WordPress site: hosting, AI-powered features, local development, custom fields back-end UX, themes for web novices. But these pieces from different authors and eras had made telling one coherent story about the parent company a difficult endeavor for nearly five years. Countless attempted brand reforms had come and gone, but we had our moment to make a change and we got it over the finish line.
A note on this innocuous animation showing how the brand visual system fits together, since some of it was short-lived. "Managed WordPress" and "Headless WordPress" were retired product names in October 2024 over disputed rights to the WordPress name. The grid also carries an endorsed WPGraphQL lockup, from a period when WP Engine sponsored that project before its founder announced his move to Automattic.
Then on the brand team I wrote the tone of voice and the style guide, defined what every shape in the new logo means and how the products relate, built systems and a roll-out strategy, and walked the company through it in a series of town halls. That gave us a beautiful re-tooling of our abstract cog logo, with softer edges, details that could more easily be read at small scale, and shapes that now lent themselves to child products. The end result was a visual language that showed you how all the pieces quite literally fit together with hosting at the core and a series of unified brands.
A rebrand with a soundtrack
The anchor was the New York Times brand manifesto video from 2020, a short piece where type and image and sound and typing work in incredible harmony, and still one of my favorite pieces of creative direction I have seen in a minute. I kept coming back to the movement and the tremendous restraint, and to a thing built to be a stage for the world, because WordPress can turn into anything and we were the backbone for publishing on the internet, so what it needed was not a brand competing for attention but a silent and confident backdrop that helps your creative content shine. Requests by Makaya McCraven plays in that video and sent me down a rabbit hole. It's dad jazz for somebody with a master's degree in physics and a public media tote bag carrying library books about revolution. It's objective and opinionated, improvisational but holding itself back, steady and driving and elevated. It contains multitudes. It adapts to the moment.