How to craft a visual identity for your team
Giving a team its own unique identity not only champions its people, but the larger company’s culture.
As a brand designer, crafting a team’s identity is a rewarding process since it’s all about empowering people. I want to take you through the process for creating a team identity, and how it can enable your company to champion its teams.
To break this down, we’re going to be taking a look at an identity we created for our internal security team here at Auth0 — a product that secures the world’s identities for brands in every sector. We’ll start with an exploration phase where we’ll dive into the context of this project.
Exploration Phase
For our security team, this project began like many do in corporate life — the slack thread! Logos were requested, visuals theorized, back-and-forth on who needs it and when — and then we took a step back to ask…why?
A challenge for our security team is that they’re not only rapidly expanding their influence, but their team at Auth0. They’re bringing important security practices and establishing a voice within the organization and larger security industry — a logo could either reinforce or confuse the team’s intent.
For this particular ask, the team wanted an event logo for content that they would be sharing internally and externally about security best practices and important standards during October’s NCSAM or National Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
After learning some initial context around the team, I used the 5W1H structure (Who, What, Why, When, Where and How) of gathering information. This very simple structure can be applied to nearly any problem and helps everyone align on the vision for the team brand.
Why (Goals)
- Realign the team’s vision with the introduction of the new CISO (Chief information Security Officer,) Jameeka Green Aaron.
- Increase awareness around best practices like: phishing, secure coding, identity, and being an advocate for security and privacy.
- Cultivate a security culture — creating a visual identity that helps everyone in the company feel that security is part of their jobs, because it is!
Who ( Stakeholders + Audience)
- The CISO org within Auth0
- Everyone at Auth0
When (Timing)
- We had about a month to align, craft this identity, and have guidelines so the team could make content for NCSAM.
Looking at what we gathered we realized the impact of this proposed “logo” would be far too great to not have a thoughtful brand strategy, and considering the larger context around this growing team, it provided the perfect opportunity to give this team an identity. ✨
For this new identity we needed to learn how our audience (the team) communicates, where they communicate, and what they need to best communicate— so we could create the best brand system for their skillset.
How (they communicate)
- Written documentation around guidelines and best practices
- Recorded meetings for events, training, and walkthroughs
- Daily/Casual communication in Slack (team community)
- Take-away presentations for training and updates
Where (they communicate)
- Internal Confluence pages (Business wiki)
- Zoom Meetings
- Gamification events
- Speaker series
- Slack
- Google Slides
What (they need to communicate)
- Confluence templates to refresh all graphics
- Zoom backgrounds (as personalized as possible)
- Motion graphics for videos and dynamic backgrounds
- Speaker-centric graphics
- Slack Emojis
- Google slides template
With the exploration phase wrapped up we could move on to everyone’s favorite part, the crafting phase!
Crafting Phase
Now that we have all the essential parts, we could begin connecting our goals, audience, and needed materials to make this identity come to life — while also keeping our master brand’s message “Secure access for everyone, but not just anyone” top of mind.
We continued to refine how these key factors overlapped and arrived at the following identity logic to use as our guiding identity principle: “Secure access is everyone.” This encapsulates that our CISO team is understandably dependent on each individual for creating a security culture of trust.
Since trust is an empathetic term, and can mean many different things within a certain context, we wanted to align on how we defined “trust.”
Statement of trust:
“Trust is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.”
This definition began to inspire shape languages that could come to resemble trust, and people coming together to build a strong security culture.
We then began identifying how this could represent the individual by using biometrics. Biometrics is an exciting tool within the larger security industry, and for our team we can use biometrics to represent all of our individual team members, while also creating a visual language to represent the team as a whole. Using the following patterns we were able to create custom visual containers for each speaker and team member.
We specifically focused on fingerprints which can be divided into three main categories: the arch, whorl, and loop. These patterns were also created in a way so they fit within the look and feel of our master Auth0 brand.
The identity toolbox:
With the two main identity tools (shape language and patterns) we could begin to extrapolate how these could work across the how, where and what of the team identity. (Note, due to the sensitive nature of this brand being for our internal security team we could not show a comprehensive snapshot of all materials due to phishing attacks.)
Launch Phase
Now that we finally arrived to our identity toolbox, it was time to launch! In order to have this ready for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month we developed a set of team brand guidelines, self-service templates, assets for motion graphics, slack emojis, and of course, swag!
For me, this 3 step process (explore, craft, launch) and the 5W1H structure (Who, What, Why, When, Where and How) of gathering information is always my go-to for breaking down a project. I can make sure I’m thinking of identity design holistically, while also making it approachable for stakeholders. Checkout this exploration phase template for your own projects!
If you have any thoughts, or things to add from your own process, I’d love to hear them below! Or add me on linkedin to continue the conversation.
