Meet the New Optimizely

Introducing the new Optimizely brand

We’ve come a long way from the Optimizely we first launched in 2010. When we started, our goal was to make it easy for marketers and business users to validate their ideas with “A/B testing you’ll actually use.” Today we’re not only helping marketers, but we’re also powering experimentation for developers, product teams, and data scientists, across some of the world’s largest brands. Our customers still use Optimizely to test on their websites with ease and flexibility, but they are also pushing the boundaries of digital experience optimization by experimenting server-side across the full product development lifecycle, scaling out personalization campaigns, and reporting on their programs.

So today, we’re introducing a new look for Optimizely that reflects this growth in our customers and in our enterprise-ready platform. The new brand represents a bold future in which every business can relentlessly experiment in pursuit of digital experiences that outperform the competition.

Defining the new Optimizely with data

At Optimizely, we believe that all decisions should be based in data. From the very beginning, our goal has been to democratize decision making by helping our customers eliminate digital guesswork through experimentation. So when it came to rebranding our identity we wanted to do it with data.

In early 2018, we joined forces with a branding agency, Moving Brands, to help us examine our existing visual identity, establish a new brand story, and finally launch into a creative exploration for a new logotype, mark, and brand system. Our plan was to test and validate fundamental messages, creative assets, and a new user interface, at key points throughout the design process.

We started by defining the brand attributes that were genuinely important to Optimizely. We spoke with key stakeholders including, employees, partners, and customers and we also surveyed our key constituents to gather data on which brand attributes best represented Optimizely’s brand. Through this qualitative and quantitative approach, we eventually landed on a set of core values. We then used this data to develop what is now the new Optimizely brand story:

Next stop: logo design

With the brand story defined, we set out to create a new logo that simply conveyed the power of experimentation. We explored shapes that expressed evolution, testing, experimentation, and most importantly this idea of iterating to move your digital products forward. We landed on three different marks that we felt delivered the power of experimentation.

We used qualitative feedback from a survey we conducted with Optimizely employees, customers, and partners to iterate on our new logo before rolling it out. There was one clear winner of the three new versions we presented. The new mark was preferred by the majority for its subtle reference to experimentation and its illustration of moving a business forward. We’re excited with the outcome and what became the new Optimizely mark:

It’s a symbol that shows the progression from experiments (lines) to implementation (solid). The movement up and to the right speaks to the business outcome of experimentation. One of the reasons we chose the bold, modern sans serif typeface, NB international, was that it contains a monospace font that is often used in typesetting computer code. This set will be used when referencing data and it helps illustrate our new focus on not only empowering marketers, but also helping engineering and product teams roll out new products with confidence.