Prisma Redux
The muse was Ratatat. The brief was “surreal.” Before and after inside.
We rebranded Prisma. It went live last week.
Here’s what we were solving:
Their brand looked like their competitors’ brands. Not vaguely. Specifically.
The teal-green sat within a shade of Neon, Netlify, and Supabase.
The background pattern read as a cousin of Drizzle’s rain mark.
The logo was an upright triangle in nearly the same silhouette as Vercel’s.
Color from one neighbor. Pattern from another. Mark from a third.
None of it was laziness. The site was clean, the grid was disciplined, the icon set was well built. Every individual decision was defensible. But every decision had been made by glancing sideways at what “good” looked like in the category, and without considering emotional resonance.
Then we got into the strategy
Once we started digging at emotional resonance, one word kept surfacing.
Surreal.
They wanted the brand to feel like a dream you could go to sleep inside of, trusting the software to run in the background, databases squared away and ready when you wake up.
The muse we landed on was Ratatat.
Everything downstream came out of that.
Here’s what they looked like before/after:
Great brands are still stolen. There’s just no honor in stealing what’s already been stolen.
Get off the screen and find something that resonates.
— Zach
