The Challenge

CitizenLab had outgrown its name. The company served governments across eight markets, but its brand no longer matched its ambition. As the only in-house designer, I had to lead a full rebrand without pausing the day-to-day brand work the company ran on. The platform is fully white-label, so citizens never see the brand; every decision had to earn the trust of institutional buyers: procurement managers, political officers, policy directors. The real risk wasn't designing a new logo. It was making a brand that 50 people across 26 nationalities could actually use, consistently, without a designer gatekeeping every asset.

My Process

Discovery. Audited the existing brand across every touchpoint, mapped where it broke down by market, and aligned stakeholders across six departments on what the rebrand had to achieve.

Strategy. Directed two external agencies and a team of five freelancers across graphic design and web. When the naming process stalled, I ran an AI-assisted stakeholder workshop that surfaced "Go Vocal" from within the team, and the name went to a company-wide vote and won.

Design. Steered the identity system through approval cycles: the verbal and visual identity, and crucially the components a non-designer would reach for every day. I designed for reuse from the start: warm and energetic at the surface, rigorous enough at the system level for non-designers to stay on-brand at scale.

Implementation. Built a 30+ template library, localised assets across eight markets, and rolled the system out company-wide with a training program. This is the part most rebrands skip, and usually why they fade.

Key Decisions

Design the system before the showpieces. I prioritised the templates and components teams use every day over hero assets that look good in a case study but don't scale. Adoption was the goal.

Warmth at the surface, precision in the system. The identity could be bold and human; the design system had to be rigorous enough for non-designers to stay on-brand across eight markets without supervision.

Bring the team in early. Training and self-serve tooling weren't an afterthought. They were the deliverable. A brand only lands when the people using it can run with it.

Results

The rebrand launched on schedule across all eight markets. Within six months, around 75% of brand materials were being produced independently by non-designers, and more than 50 colleagues across Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Product had completed brand training. The new identity established Go Vocal as a distinct, recognisable presence in a civic-tech sector where most competitors still look like municipal software.

What Made This Different

Alongside the rebrand, I ran a parallel AI-powered version of the same process as applied research for my Master's thesis, using LLMs and image generation across each branding phase, then comparing the results against the human-led work. It made me faster and sharper inside the real project, and it's why AI in brand production is now part of how I work, not a novelty I talk about.

The Brand Refresh (2024 to present)

A year after launch, I ran a full audit of the brand system to see what was holding up and what wasn't. The bigger finding was strategic: we were still presenting ourselves as young and innovative, when we needed to be read as a thought leader: the most experienced, most knowledgeable voice in our market.

So I built the case for change before touching the visuals. I ran extensive trend research, analysed competitors, and led focus groups with clients in the US and Germany. Then I tested directions in real campaigns: our Trends webinar, the annual Impact Report, and the Year in Review, a personalised report we send to each client. The reception was strong, so I developed three brand concepts, refined them through moodboards, and landed on the approved direction.

Implementation is underway. We're rebuilding the website from the ground up, and evolving the current one in parallel for a smoother transition. The new visual language is already live across social media, slide decks, webinars, sales decks, and event materials.