“Why should we change our name?” I was asked that question in December 2022’.
The easy answer is that "Drimz" is one of those names no one can spell on the phone verbally without repeating themselves. And when you say it - the person hearing it will probably write it as it sounds - "Dreams".
The longer, more professional answer is that to achieve the company’s North Star Metric - our new name has to have a long-term effect on the ideal users we will go after - with the highest accuracy, as fast as possible, cost-effectively.
The brief answer is that we’re building a brand.
In case you missed it - we are an agile, lean team working in stealth on a code-based design tool that integrates right into the developer's codebase. The goal? For designers to design real products instead of just mockups and prototypes.
Renaming
The renaming process was broken down into 6 key components:
- Preliminary Data | People already have a certain view about us.
- Differentiation | What makes us unique.
- ICP & GTM | Market segments, who do we go after, and how do we get them.
- Naming | Pronunciation, flexibility, originality, memorability.
- Legal & Growth | Trademark, domain and SEO audit.
- Decision.
Below, are some highlights from the process and how we addressed each challenge:
Data
*First we surveyed potential power users and colleagues + conducted numerous qualitative conversations with questions like “What is our strongest value proposition?” and “Based on your experience with us and the solution we offer to date, who will get the most value from us?”, to understand better our colleagues’ hunches about ideal personas, current name, and the solution’s future - so we can choose a name based on the minimal qualitative data we can collect.
Differentiation?
In my eyes a re-used word that implies we should be different and stand out in our market, outperform, and grow. We prefer to think about how we create a new distinction in value for an audience that didn't exist before. Don’t get me wrong - our audience exists, but evolves and adapts as new technologies unfold - resulting in a new audience type. So our mission in “differentiation” is more “how do we rewrite the rules of the game and communicate them”.
Ideal Customer Profile
A very important part of the rebrand was to consider the characteristics and attributes of our target audience that we wanted to attract: demographics, psychographics, behavior patterns, needs, and preferences. We created an internal, simple, live survey assessing our initial market segment, who to go after in the organization, and our overall go-to-market strategy.
*Keep in mind - our persona changes as various roles and audience types are introduced to Jux;
⌨️ Users → buy for the experience.
👑 Champions → buy for solving the problem.
🤝 Decision Makers → buy for outcomes.
💰 Financial Buyers → buy for ROI.
»Our goal: one brand that communicates to a range of stakeholders.
Spectrum
The next thing we created was a brand personality spectrum. To do this, the founders filled out a personal personality assessment with no prior preparation, according to how they perceive the company, and themselves to a certain extent, but not necessarily in full accordance. The large red dot in the image below represents the mean of the results.
This spectrum helps us continuously avoid creating a gap between the company’s REAL personality and what we tell the world we are. It’s our personality north-star. There is rarely enough discussion about this phase, yet doing it right - directly impacts crucial growth / rev metrics in the long-run.
Naming
Only once we had completed all of the above, was it time to start thinking about a name. To arrive at a name, it was important to reiterate the main problem we're trying to solve: When creating software experiences today, designing and developing something as simple as a button requires multiple tools and systems.
For instance; "Olto", a short form for "all together now", a song by the Beatles was indeed an option, not to mention SEO cost-effective, but two ex-Amazons snatched it.
So Jux.
*We approved Jux for registration as a trademark in five regions worldwide.
The Main Event
Here are a few of the brand discoveries we had in this never-ending, fascinating process:
The Button
Our logo is a button, the most known and used component when designing software experiences. A minor tweak in a simple button can have a massive impact on a business's growth. We didn't find any other company that had made us of a button as a core symbol in its logo.
The logo is also a reminder of the design and development relationship when creating a component, modifying and affecting it.
The Name
Jux is an abbreviation of Juxtaposition, the noun that describes placing two concepts, objects, or personalities next to each other, thereby highlighting their innate differences and similarities. During user feedback sessions, we heard sentiments like "Jux? it's like juice!" and "Just UX! love it!"
States matter. The logo is not only a brand element, but an actual button, which has to have all of its possible interactive states mapped out, like for any other ordinary component from a software’s design system. For this reason, the standard style-guide ‘logo’ section took on some functional depth with our rebrand.
Design to Code
It's a tricky task to convey the idea that during product design, code is written. A true juxtaposition. This is one of our core technological moats we’re working on. In certain digital assets, we chose to reveal the code that represents the button as a way to strengthen our scrollytelling.
The color palette is also related to code in the sense that it’s based on four main colors that are commonly used in developers’ CLI daily.
The Cap
To take our brand concept a step further, we had the button’s code embedded in the inner fabric of our swag.
Currently, we have two types of caps:
The Font
We chose “Gain” by the good folks from ״nice to type״ first and foremost because it looks good. But that wasn’t the only reason.
Most importantly, Gain is a variable font. This provides us with a number of benefits like:
- Flexibility with a wide range of styles and weights
- The ability to fine-tune and better control typography just like our mama taught us.
- Making on-the-fly adjustments to font attributes
- Staying consistent
- Creating custom font variations that align perfectly with Jux’s unique identity
- Responsive design
- Optimal readability and aesthetics
- Great for smooth and dynamic animations
Our font choice is about staying ahead of the curve. No pain, no gain.
The Statement
For our brand tagline, we considered several options like:
- A Button State of Mind.
- Complete Squad Harmony.
- Our State is Always Focused.
- Codebase and Interface Unite.
Whenever we use powerful statements, we try to make them relevant to the pain and the problem we are trying to solve. Rather than throwing all taglines at every opportunity, we decided to focus on communicating the phrase:
Future Outlook
- We’re obsessively focusing on aligning the visual language with the tool itself. It’s a challenging mission to ensure consistency while also meeting our audience's expectations. To do this - Jux is lucky to have skilled and gifted people on the team, with skin in the game - some of which are luckily also our primary audience.
- We plan on tackling interactivity. Since we’re building a product design tool, the commitment and precision here are 10x. Micro-animations will be our next step - offering immediate visual feedback to users, reducing cognitive load, providing guidance and orientation, prioritization and hierarchy, style and delight. But it needs to be executed using silk gloves, and excellent taste.
- We will stay flexible. Retrospectively, with new perspectives and learnings, we could’ve decided on a different name. But as an early-stage company, that will always be the case. The most important thing is to act with agility and flexibility and keep an open mind to how things might change in the future. With a button state of mind.
