Rebuilding Lumen: identity to system in 21 days
A billing startup came to us mid-pivot with a logo it had outgrown and a site that undersold it. We rebuilt the whole surface — mark, marketing, and the system underneath — before its next launch.
Lumen had product-market fit and a brand that quietly worked against it. The wordmark was a placeholder that had calcified into the logo; the site was three years of bolt-ons stacked on a template. Every new feature made the seams show more. They didn't need a refresh — they needed the surface to finally match the thing they'd built underneath.
They came to us because they'd read SONAR. That's the whole premise of this channel: we publish the thinking, and when a reader is ready to build, the work is already legible to them. Lumen arrived knowing exactly how we'd approach it.
A brand that reads as “early” when the company is anything but. Inconsistent type, a mark that didn't scale below 32px, and marketing pages that each spoke a slightly different language. The cost wasn't aesthetic — it was trust. Enterprise buyers were bouncing before the demo.
One sprint, three surfaces, no committee. We ran identity, site, and design system in parallel rather than in sequence, so decisions made in the mark propagated into the components the same day. Twenty-one days, one shared source of truth, shipped live before their funding announcement.
The redesign isn't a coat of paint — it's the moment the outside catches up to the inside.
Template hero, four competing typefaces, a mark that dissolved at favicon size.
One type system, a mark engineered from 16px up, marketing that speaks one voice.
- IdentityWordmark, monogram, and a full type + colour system scaled from favicon to billboard.
- SiteNine marketing pages rebuilt on a component library — one voice, one grid, one source of truth.
- SystemA living design system with tokens the team ships against, so the brand holds as they grow.