Building the visual world around an ever-changing startup

I wasn’t actually supposed to stay.

I originally arrived at Brainnwave on secondment from service design agency Nile. The plan was to spend four days a week helping the company run design sprints.

That isn’t quite what happened.

Brainnwave was a data startup of around 30 people with an ambitious idea to become something like an “Amazon of data” - a marketplace where organisations could discover and buy datasets, satellite imagery and other information.

I started out designing parts of that marketplace: product pages, filters, geographic selectors and the interfaces needed to navigate some very complicated data.

But there was another project happening alongside it that I found much more interesting.

Brainnwave was working with Aggreko, combining different sources of data and using them to identify sales opportunities, rank markets and understand things like country risk.

More importantly, somebody was actually paying us to do it.

I remember asking a fairly obvious question: if this is where we’re creating real value, why aren’t we doing more of it?

I certainly can’t claim responsibility for the decision that followed, but within about six months the marketplace was gone and the company had pivoted towards building intelligence products around combined data.

By then I’d decided I wanted to stay too.

Somewhere along the way, I became the design department.

Following the pivot, Brainnwave became a much smaller company before beginning to grow again.

Design had previously been largely developer-led. There wasn’t an established visual language for the product, a mature design function or really anybody asking how all the different pieces should fit together.

Increasingly, that became my job.

I designed the interfaces, challenged how things worked, helped shape products before they existed, rebuilt websites, created presentations and eventually took responsibility for the company’s wider creative direction.

I became part of the leadership team and worked directly with the founders. One of the nicest bits of feedback I received from our CEO was that I was always thinking about the next iteration rather than simply designing the one immediately in front of me.

For five or six of my seven and a half years at Brainnwave, I was effectively the sole designer. We eventually hired another designer into the team, but for most of my time there, if something needed designing, it usually landed with me.

An identity that could actually behave like a system

The full mark worked well at larger sizes, but all those points and connections weren’t appropriate everywhere.

So I developed a simplified version for smaller applications, alongside horizontal and vertical lockups, versions with and without the tagline, and the practical variations we needed across digital and physical environments.

Heck, I even animated a version for our videos.

The point wasn’t to produce a giant brand-guidelines document.

It was to make sure that whether somebody encountered Brainnwave on a website, a presentation, a conference stand or a tiny browser favicon, it still felt like the same company.

Then I set to work on pretty much everything.

A startup generates an astonishing number of things that need designing.

The identity gradually spread across the website, sales decks, investor presentations, documents, social media, signage, stationery, events, conference stands, business cards, notebooks, pens and whatever else appeared next.

Sometimes that meant defining the direction and working with suppliers to deliver it.

Quite often it meant making the thing myself.

Taking design into the product

The same thinking increasingly extended into Brainnwave’s software.

When I joined, much of the interface had naturally grown out of development. As my role expanded, I started introducing more deliberate interaction patterns, navigation, hierarchy and visual consistency.

Some problems were deceptively complicated. Selecting a country or geographic area could involve different datasets, levels of granularity and ways of interacting with maps. Dashboards had to make dense information understandable without losing the flexibility our users needed.

I worked across those problems from early concepts and information architecture through to detailed interface design, usually alongside developers, data scientists and product stakeholders.

I was interested in where the product could go next, and worked with developers and data scientists to turn that thinking into the version we could actually build.

The company never really stopped moving.

Over seven and a half years, Brainnwave changed direction a lot.

The original data marketplace disappeared. Our technology moved through market intelligence, data intelligence and decision intelligence. Products gained names, lost names and changed shape. We built things ourselves, co-developed products with partners and explored opportunities across industries and countries.

Even our tagline evolved.

One of my favourites was:

Data. Intelligence.

The punctuation deliberately allowed it to mean two things: data intelligence, but also data and intelligence as separate ideas.

Later that became Decision Intelligence as the company’s positioning moved again.

As the company changed direction, I kept adapting the identity, website and product around what we were building next. The challenge was keeping those pieces connected while the proposition itself was moving.

I was continually trying to give form to whatever Brainnwave was becoming next.