What’s up with the new website? Taking the first step toward a new brand
Seen the new look on the Intercom website today? We made an in-depth video to share our redesign process (scroll down), but for those who don’t have 18 minutes to spare, read on.
Memorable brands create enduring connections with the people who interact with them. They do this by clearly articulating what they stand for. These days customers want to know not just what products and services a business can provide, but the mission that drives the company at its core, the promise it’s making to its users.
The Intercom brand promise
At Intercom, all of our work is anchored by this promise: interacting with users through Intercom will help you build better customer relationships – and drive faster growth for your business as a result.
“This identity is more than a design makeover – we believe it is a truer representation of who we are as a brand”
Over a year ago, we started thinking about how we could express this brand promise in a fresh way and today, we’re taking the first step by rolling out our new visual identity on the website. This identity is more than a design makeover – we believe it is a truer representation of who we are as a brand.
So what did we change – and honestly why are we writing about it? We’re certainly not the first company to redesign a website. But we think the design decisions we made says a lot about who we are as a company.
Before we get going – a big shoutout to our design agency, Instrument, who partnered with us on this whole effort and enabled our team to support ongoing work.
(Our Inside Intercom blog got a makeover last year; the latest overhaul applies to the main pages on Intercom.com.)
Always on the move
On practically every page, you’ll now see new hero animations that aim to turn each and every website visit into an engaging experience.
Illustrations by Olenka Malarecka with animation by Yeah Haus
Through these animations, every single person who visits our site should walk away with a better sense of our brand’s core attributes: credible, playful, advanced yet simple, and authentic. And for the right folks looking for something like the Intercom platform, a better understanding of who we are as a brand will translate to longer-term customer relationships.
Opinionated colors
The other thing you’ll notice on the website is the bold new brand color: teal (or as we like to refer to it, “Electric Mint”). The teal and our new secondary colors make up an energizing, confident color palette that is designed to make a statement and evoke an opinion.
Our new website color palette
Some might say that our new colors are polarizing – but we believe it’s better to feel something about a brand than nothing at all.
People first
Photography is traditionally a hard medium to use on a business site – the people you feature might not stick with their company long-term, a photo shoot requires significant time investment from your customers and team.
But it’s really the perfect format for celebrating our customers, the actual people who use the product. So that’s why we’re putting portraits of our customers front and center on the new site.
Customer photography by Justin Kaneps, art direction by Kelly Carpenter, production by Mika Kunisaki and Jason Yim
We went for a natural, yet energetic portrait style with backgrounds that lean into our secondary color palette. With this style, the portraits provide both credibility and variety, excitement, and joy. A great side benefit of all this photography work is that we got the chance to interact with our customers in a fun new way.
Getting to the point
As we look to introduce more people to the power of Intercom, we want the message about what we do and how we help to be undeniably clear.
So fresh headlines now stand on many of our pages, composed in a new typeface, Graphik, that is structured yet quirky in its nature, letting our message shine through in a straightforward, warm voice.
Examples of refreshed headlines and typography. Copywriting led by Chelsea Spratling. Numerals by Kyle Benson.
Fun fact: the way stats are styled on the website is inspired by small business bodega signage. They were hand-drawn in-house to give warmth to numbers that can otherwise seem cold and hard. All of our stats point to Intercom’s business impact by way of relationships with real customers, so we wanted those numbers to have a human touch.
These are a few of the myriad changes that we’re rolling out today. A 750-word blog post cannot possibly capture the hard work involved in bringing a new brand to life, so for all the brand nerds out there, check out this candid video we made about our redesign process:
Underneath the new look, we’re still the same Intercom – committed to making internet business personal. We hope you enjoy the new website and let us know what you think 🙏.
