Wave hello to our new brand (and goodbye to your CMS problems, too)

Compared to its former dark-toned look, you’ll notice that Contentful.com just got a lot more colorful. While black on black is very Berlin, where many of us call home, we wanted to take a fresh and modern approach to color.

But a brand is more than color and a logo. We wanted to visually communicate our mission: Modernizing how content flows by leading the transition from legacy CMS to content infrastructure.

We've chosen to express this mission as the "Contentful wave". You'll see it washing up across many of our pages –– free-flowing lines, smooth transitions, clean and full of motion, much like flowing water. Compare this to our customers’ experience with traditional CMSes, where content is frozen in CMS boxes, muddled with code, and virtually impossible to use across digital channels without an army of cut-and-paste elves.

At the heart of Contentful is our promise: empowering experts. Empowering describes both our product and our people. Through content infrastructure, we empower digital teams to collaborate simultaneously, build in the languages and frameworks of their choice, easily integrate with other services, and endlessly iterate.

Through our people, we partner with customers to build POCs, create content models perfectly tailored to business needs and workflows, and drive greater business value through speed to market and more efficient digital product development.

We also know our customers are experts. We approach them with a level of respect and partnership where we don’t assume there’s a single right way. Most out-of-the-box CMSes preprogram their workflows and functionality. We value the power of customization, change and integration, and make our powerful open APIs ready to meet any challenge.

Several traits of the Contentful brand guided our design choices:

• We’re authentic, so we don’t bury our solutions under layers of marketing doubletalk.

• We’re focused, so our design reflects clear pathways to information and deeper, thoughtfully categorized resources to help you at any stage of planning, buying or implementation.

• Our solution is a fresh approach to content management, and our design reflects this fresh perspective — open, light and modern.

• And finally, we’re warm — approachable, welcoming, and human like you. Because kind, helpful people are always better than bots.

Rolling out our brand refresh with vivid images, clever icons and some quirky flair has been a labor of love across our design, content and development teams. A huge thanks to Esa McGavin, our web product owner for leading the project, Helen Stead for taking a lead on interpreting the brand guidelines and producing the web style guide, and Jani Komulainen for building the elements of the new site (whilst maintaining our old site,too!).

Having the ability to iterate messaging on the fly is incredibly valuable to our marketing team. We can spin up campaigns with ease, as well as new customer stories as they keep dazzling us with amazing use cases — from Super Bowl to Black Friday campaigns, Times Square billboards, even digital signage throughout a fleet of cruise ships. We're looking forward to even more speed and agility with our very own digital products.

Some companies call building with their own products “eating your own dogfood,” but I’d like to think of it as drinking our own champagne –– a refreshing celebration of all things possible with Contentful.