Revitalizing Sounding Board's brand to bridge the leadership gap.

Sounding Board had built one of the most adaptive leadership-development platforms on the market—solution design, adaptive software, people-to-people coaching, and proprietary data, all flexing to an organization's people strategy. But the brand still read like a coaching marketplace, not the enterprise platform it had become.

The buyers it needed to win—talent and L&D leaders at Intel, EY, and Cloudera—were evaluating a six-figure investment. The identity had to signal the same sophistication as the product, and tell one story end-to-end: bridging the leadership gap.

I started inside the company—not in the design file. The brand book opens with an internal brand: a corporate philosophy that turns employees at every level into ambassadors of the company's values, so the identity ships consistently from sales call to product UI.

That foundation gave every downstream decision a reason. The vision became the north star; the single statement became the line every asset had to earn.

To stand out in a hyper-competitive segment, the brand needed a distinct, consistent voice across every internal and external touchpoint—aligned to the six attributes and to the customer's real pain points in HR and L&D.

The symbol is a rising figure—an upward check formed from the dynamic gradient that runs through the whole system. It reads at once as a person ascending and as progress confirmed: the visual shorthand for closing the gap.

I documented clear-space, minimum sizing, and the full set of approved treatments—primary on light, knockout on ink—so the mark stays unmistakable from a favicon to a conference banner.

Three primaries carry the brand—a deep, trustworthy blue, a brighter digital blue, and a signature teal that energizes the system. A secondary set adds a light teal, true black, and a warm yellow accent for moments that need to pop. Every value ships with an 80/60/40/20 tint ramp for flexible, accessible application.

Aglet Sans—a soft, confident rounded grotesque—carries headlines and gives the brand its friendly-but-premium character. Roboto handles body copy: neutral, screen-tested, endlessly legible. A modular scale (1.15 ratio) keeps every heading level in proportion from h1 down to fine print.

Beyond logo, color, and type, a brand lives or dies on its connective tissue. I built three supporting libraries so anyone—designer or not—could produce on-brand work at speed.

Designing the system was half the job; landing it inside the company was the other half. I built the brand book as the single source of truth, then drove a phased rollout—an all-hands reveal, team-by-team deep dives, and a kit of decks and templates so every function could apply the brand without me in the room.

Within two quarters the system was producing measurable lift across every revenue surface—because every artifact finally pointed at the same claim and the same customer. The refresh anchored Fortune 500 acquisition and a category-defining "Leader Development Platform" position.