Kaizen is a sophisticated networking tool. Fabulous capability for allowing networks to be maintained remotely, upgraded and monitored, in a way that most tools don't do.

It was built by engineers, and it showed. Everything was black, basically. Grey on black for the presentation, grey on black for the deck. There was no brand, no name, no proposition.

So that was my consultation, and it started somewhere very small. The logo colour. It was a yellow amber. That was actually my very first engagement with them. That was the first point, and it worked back from there.

Think about the brand colour, especially in functional software. It is widely understood now that colour has a language. There is a language to it: red is alert, green is okay.

They had used the brand yellow everywhere. They used it for the brand. They used it for visual highlights. They used it as an alert colour. They had used it everywhere, so they hadn't used it intentionally.

And this is a product whose core function and identity is alerting and monitoring.

So the brand could not have it. In a product whose job is telling you something is wrong, that colour is not decoration. It is the mechanism, and it was already spoken for.

We rebuilt the design system. Still early days.