• Asana
  • Enterprise Tech
  • Branding

The making of a Silicon Valley icon: how we gave Asana true personality

When Asana was set up by Dustin Moskovitz (co-founder of Facebook and inventor of the ‘like’ button) and Justin Rosenstein (fellow Facebooker and ex-Googler), it was never going to be an ordinary Silicon Valley start-up. It started out providing shared task lists and bug trackers but grew into a collaboration software company with cult status. Its thousands of customers couldn’t imagine using any other app. It was a great product and a great firm with plenty of personality, but its branding didn’t convey that.

Share this

Before and after Moving Brands redesigned the Asana logo
In an ocean of bland, blue-tinted enterprise software, we saw ourselves as a magical, multicolored narwhal — but if you looked at us from the outside, it’s understandable if all you saw was another fish.

Micah Diagle
Product Designer

Do great things together

The Asana team had already been at work, brainstorming and pinpointing what made them ‘them’. They recognised a need for an objective, expert partner to help them refine, define and prioritize their ideas, so we augmented their internal team to push the project forward. To begin, we developed a brand narrative: “Do great things together”. This would serve as the anchor for the redesign, the product launch and for every-day business decisions.

The power of collaboration

The brand story’s theme of ‘the power of collaboration’ was used as an imaginative springboard for everything from typeface to colour palette. We retained Asana’s inimitable three dots, but placed them in a huddle to signify collaboration, and used bright gradients to represent the energy of teamwork. The dots also serve to form an abstract ‘A’ in the mark, which symbolizes the limitless potential of people working together. 

 

Working onsite

Our designers frequently worked onsite with the Asana team, honing every detail of the mark, typography and colour palette to convey a sense of balance, clarity, and purpose-driven design. Our enthusiasm for collaboration was demonstrated in replacing our usual productivity and program management tools with using Asana at every stage of the project, providing feedback and comments within the tool.

 

When I see this on my phone’s homescreen, it’s obvious: that’s the teamwork app.

Justin Rosenstein,

Co-founder

Close partnership

As close partners with the design team, we delivered an identity that simply and powerfully conveys what lies at the core of the brand — a belief that Asana enables and empowers people to do work that changes the world.