Almost a year ago, we embarked on a journey to reimagine our visual identity as part of a broader rebrand process. In this post, I’ll talk about how our design team tackled this challenge. As designers, we love solving problems, and we spent many months working on this one. We’re so excited to share the results with you.
The problem
Instabug is well known for being the best bug reporting tool on the market for mobile apps, but we help mobile teams tackle more than just bugs. Over the last seven years, we’ve grown from being the go-to bug reporting tool for app developers to become a multi-product platform for Real-Time Contextual Insights.
Externally, we had a brand perception problem, and our visual identity didn’t reflect our product evolution. Internally, we lacked a unified design system that would ensure consistency across designers, products, and channels.
Before our rebrand, our website focused on bug reporting and our logo was a ladybug.
So we went back to the drawing board to create a holistic, consistent, and scalable design language to use within all of our products and in our marketing and sales efforts to promote them.
The process
We started with a brand personality workshop where we measured Instabug against a set of divergent traits, like “Familiar vs. Disruptive” and “Serious vs. Playful.” From this came a clearer picture of our personality, and the challenge we had ahead of us to redefine our visual identity.
On the left are the personality traits exhibited by the ladybug logo. On the right are the personality traits we defined for our brand. We needed to align our visual identity with our brand personality traits.
When it came to the logo, it was a difficult decision to leave behind our friendly ladybug, our lucky charm over the last seven years. We didn’t initially set out to change our logo. In fact, we started by exploring different versions of the ladybug.
We then decided to approach the logo from a zero state, as if we were designing a logo from scratch for Instabug as it stands today (not Instabug when it first launched in 2012). We were inspired by keywords like “insightful,” “instant,” and “actionable.”
When we reviewed our options, the choice to retire our beloved ladybug and take a chance on a new direction was clear.
We narrowed in on the new design and went through rounds of feedback to refine it. After several iterations, we arrived at our new logo. Meet the new Instabug:
We also developed a new illustration style based on the same principles we used to create the logo.
Our illustration style before the rebrand (left) and after (right).
The outcomes
We released a new logo along with a refreshed website. In addition to applying our new visual identity to our website, we revisited its information architecture and created a new sitemap along with completely new content and more meaningful messaging.
The experience is smoother, we’ve added micro animations for delight and impact, and the overall design including interactions, visual, content, and motion are unified to communicate our new positioning as a platform for Real-Time Contextual Insights. You can check it out here.
Meanwhile, we’ve created and started to apply a comprehensive and professional design system that stretches across all of our products. This long and ongoing process deserves its own blog post, so stay tuned.
Thanks to our new design system, over the past year, we’ve released UI/UX enhancements that have made our dashboard more intuitive and easier to use so that our customers are empowered to accelerate their workflows and release with confidence.
What’s next
Our rebrand has been an incredible design journey so far, and we’re not finished. We have the foundation set with our new logo and visual extensions that will support and enhance the brand’s visual experience along the way.
Next, we’ll be cascading these elements and applying the above to all other areas of our brand, including iconography, our blog design, and our presence on external sites.
We still have more work to do and problems to solve, and we’re thrilled to be able to share our journey with you. We’d love to hear your feedback! Please let us know your thoughts.
