ZeroTurnaround
Team Leadership | Product | Marketing | Brand
Helping software eat the world faster
I headed up and grew the design team at ZeroTurnaround for 3 years until the company was acquired by Rogue Wave Software at the end of 2017. We handled everything design related, including but not limited to, product design, research, branding, marketing, conferences and internal services.
The work below represents the efforts of the fantastic team I was fortunate enough to bring together, guide and work alongside.
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One of ZeroTurnaround's most important values was whimsy, and where possible, we injected this into the branding. Each product was accompanied by a series of illustrations using either Duke the Java mascot, or the Android bot.
This was also carried through to the products where appropriate. Here is an empty view from XRebel, a tool that helps developers find and fix issues in their web applications.
Who said developer tools have to be sterile?
On product design, the main challenges were usually centered around taking something incredibly complex and presenting it in a useful and elegant way for software developers. This required our product designers to work closely with product managers and engineering teams.
XRebel Hub (now QRebel) is an Application Performance Monitoring solution that allows teams to be alerted of any performance regressions between builds and drill down to find the root cause to aid in fixing any issues.
Obligatory shots of people hard at work with Post-It notes and print outs. Mapping out flows, customer journeys and processes.
In addition to attending several conferences, we also ran one of our own. GeekOut is the largest Java conference in the Baltics with over 600 attendees. With event specialists, Hype, our team handled everything from branding to web, event signage to swag and of course the overall attendee experience. Some of the most positive feedback every year was related in some way to the graphic design. In 2016, we generated more than 1200 unique print files for the event.
Due to the drive to constantly improve the conference experience, GeekOut grew year on year and in 2017, even became profitable.
We also designed anything needed for internal use. Office interiors, team hoodies, t-shirts, promotional items etc. all infused with ZT’s trademark geeky humour.
Prior to the Rogue Wave Software acquisition, we had started a rebranding effort as we were feeling the need to present a more grown up version of ZT to the world. After a period of research we'd decided to move away from cartoon characters and aim for a bolder graphic style.
One element which we'd been bouncing around for almost a year was a new logo. An idea born after a morning call had been fleshed out and validated by the evening. Passed between different members of the team for further refinement and exploration.