How brand design works at PlanetScale
Learn how the Brand team designs and builds marketing experiences at PlanetScale.
What is brand design?
The Brand team is responsible for the look and feel of the marketing touchpoints of PlanetScale. We design and develop the PlanetScale marketing website, swag, and all other marketing and sales collateral. Everything a customer interacts with, except the product itself, is shaped by the Brand team. We work closely with Developer Education and Growth Marketing teams to support their campaigns, tech talks, and educational content.
Who we are
When someone asks what design agency did PlanetScale’s logo or website, it’s a big compliment. Our in-house Brand team does all of the work. As a lean group of T-shaped generalists, we make the most of our interdisciplinary skillsets to push and influence each other’s work.
How we execute
Flagship illustrations
We employ stylized-realism in 3D to illustrate our major product or feature releases, like Data Imports, Insights, and PlanetScale Boost, by sketching, modeling, lighting, and rendering custom scenes in Cinema 4D.
Whether we are building on the product experience or imagining a more abstract representation, the goal of these illustrations is to express the emotion behind the benefits of our flagship launches.
Swag
PlanetScale only produces swag we are proud to own. We spend time sourcing high-quality garments instead of rapidly releasing new items. Our popular “database.” hat and our employees-only flight jackets are signature pieces that set the standard for future swag production.
Design engineering
Like the product design team, we don’t have a formal handoff process, allowing us to collaborate closer and quickly nail the details in the native medium of the web.
After gathering requirements and defining goals, a Visual Designer focuses on a new web page’s wireframe while exploring ways to evolve our visual language. Once a wireframe is agreed upon by stakeholders and collaborators, a Design Engineer begins to build out the page. We get into the browser as quickly as possible with our fully typesafe Next.js, Tailwind, and Framer Motion stack. As the Visual Designer’s work progresses, so does the Design Engineer’s, shipping a truly collaborative experience.
It’s important to provide delight and interest, but never at the expense of being distracting or flashy. The hero animation on the Revert product page and the animated icons of our products highlight this balance well.
What we believe in
Brand design at PlanetScale follows the principles of the product design team outlined by Jason.
Our employees have a high level of trust with each other and the autonomy to decide how best to approach a problem, implement a solution, and ship it.
We are able to move quickly because of the trust and autonomy across the company. We remove friction early on, move into higher fidelity once a direction becomes clear, and refine in the final medium (often in the browser).
Marketing touchpoints are often a new customer’s first impression of PlanetScale. They need to be performant, accessible, beautiful, and informative. The Brand team always aims to respect our audience by accurately representing the care within our database platform.