The Nylas brand lifts off!

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When I joined Nylas in September 2021, the brand was ripe for change. The company vision was evolving, and our audience was (and still is) expanding rapidly. We needed a brand that could live up to a bigger and bolder mission.

What is our identity?

The first step in the rebrand was to distill down our truth. Why do we matter? What do we stand for? We came to this core narrative: Nylas is revolutionizing the business communications landscape. We help companies unlock key insights in customer data to build engaging experiences and automated workflows that drive innovation and growth. 

We turn communications into inspiration.

With the mission set, we formulated a succinct tagline – Incite Your Future –  that encapsulates our ethos: by empowering developers and teams to innovate and disrupt, we can build a better tomorrow. 

How do we express who we are?

Nylas is made up of future thinkers, time savers, and experience enhancers who are not afraid to challenge the status quo. We are smart, sincere, and forward-looking and always aim to empower, educate, and inspire our audience. To accurately represent our personality, we focused on developing a visual and verbal style that was clear, genuine, approachable, and friendly.

Working with Big Drop, our creative agency, we began to build out our identity. From the start, we knew we wanted a logo that emulated our commitment to speed, velocity, and new frontiers. Inspired by space imagery, we landed upon a comet for our brand mark, which so clearly represents these values. Next, we chose a crisp, stylized typeface to modernize our word mark and a royal blue color to evoke a sense of trust, calm, loyalty, and confidence.

Eliciting emotion through the look and feel

With royal blue at the helm, we built out a melodic color palette that is sophisticated, welcoming, cohesive, and delightful. 

We then generated a set of modern, geometric patterns derived from our brand mark to tie everything together seamlessly.

A key goal for this project was to develop an illustrative style that would showcase our products in a clear and digestible fashion. Using photography, graphics, and illustration collages, we created engaging product moments and micro animations that make our features easy to understand and humanize our technology.

Bringing the vision to life

Next, we completely revamped our website, building a highly intuitive user experience, simplified navigation, interactive components, and animations. We also clarified our messaging with customer-centric content and applied a fresh new aesthetic with product moments, patterns, and whimsical space-themed touches to play off our new logo.

We then applied our new look and feel to all marketing collateral, making it pop with fresh imagery, revitalized color, and refined layouts.

The road to Nyla

We are so happy to introduce Nyla, the newest addition to the Nylanaut family. In our quest to find the ultimate brand mascot, she won against an assortment of creatures, including narwhals, octopuses, and orcas. While they are all wonderful in their own ways, we feel our astro-explorer is perfect.

Nyla is a sassy, strong, intrepid, code-slinging adventurer. She’s got a lot of fun experiences to take you on, so keep an eye out for her!

Getting the party started

Who doesn’t love a pre-game? Right before launch, we ramped up internal buzz with an energetic and visually stunning sizzle reel,  in-office celebrations, branded delectables, and customized Converse shoes for all employees. 

Going galactic

And on June 1, we officially launched our new brand after just six months! Our new website is live, our social media is buzzing, and you can check out billboards in downtown San Francisco, the San Francisco International Airport, and Times Square NYC. 

So, what’s next? A lot is on the horizon but we don’t want to give too much away…  Let’s just say Nylas is reaching escape velocity. You can expect out-of-this-world product development, stellar educational content, astronomical give-away offers, surprise Nyla appearances, and a whole lot more silly space puns. . .

To infinity and beyond!

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While there are many people to thank for seeing this rebrand project to fruition, I would like to extend a special thanks to my core brand team, Lauren Weldy, Minh Pham, Joe Jankowski, Sarah Rudkin, and Big Drop Inc for the amazing work they did.

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