Rebranding an hospital facilities management software, rooted in the founder's faith.
We rebranded Ruya, enterprise software for hospital facilities management.
They used to be called Building Compliance Systems, which is about as exciting as it sounds. Rashad, their founder, came to us for a name change, a rebrand, and a new homepage.
The brief was a story, not a mood board
The problem Ruya solves is a facilities team with gaps in it, where people don’t talk to each other and nobody has a shared record of what got done. Rashad wanted the opposite: everyone moving together, and all of that motion on the record.
When he explained it, he didn’t reach for a software metaphor. He told us about his pilgrimage to Mecca, and standing at the Kaaba in a crowd of people moving around it in unison, all doing the same thing at the same time.
And it was off to the races.
Creative Direction
Every stylescape stole from his faith, not his category.
The Kaaba, for its geometry and the crowd gathered around it.
The Blue Mosque in Istanbul, for its blue. (I’ve been inside. It’s gorgeous.) It also happened to be a blue none of his competitors were using.
The ants, from a verse in the Qur’an, which became an idea about ants forming a bridge.
We landed on direction two based on the concentric rows of people and the blue Mosque.
The Logo
The mark is the Kaaba: a square, with people gathered around it. Just like facilities teams gather around a building to support it.
The System
Those dots around the square became the recurring motif, concentric rings of marching ants framing the photography, the product shots, and the 3D buildings. (Designers, yes. Marching ants.)
Pair that with the blue, some iconography, product abstractions, and a solid typographic palette, and you get a brand that looks nothing like Building Compliance Systems ever did, and nothing like anyone else selling to hospitals.
None of this happens without the story
Had Rashad not told us about the pilgrimage, none of it would exist. Even the name points back to it: Ruya means vision in Arabic, both eyesight and insight.
You never know how far a small, personal story is going to carry a brand, or how different it’ll make you from everyone else in your category.
Next time you brief a designer, tell them the story you think is too personal to matter. It does.
— Zach
