Three years after redesigning our brand and site, we decided it was time for a change.

Not only the world is moving dramatically fast. The tech industry is rising as our company keeps growing in many different ways, making us consider what needs to stay in place and what needs to change.

Describing ourselves isn't an easy task. Identity is a constant evolution and not an easy question to answer. We know that the way we present our organization today will change sooner or later. Still, the challenge is to choose the right ways to express who we are now in relation to this unpredictable present, keeping our purpose authentic.

The context

Last year (2020), we built a site to attend as sponsors of an event that was going to be virtual for the first time. We wanted to keep close to people while encouraging them to stay home. As a remote company, we imagined our own house, where every room was an invitation for everyone to spend some time with us.

Event website: Building an SVG virtual stand. Read the article here.

In this house, we found it was easier to express what happens inside our culture by representing and sharing our main topics and activities that take place in our daily time together.
Then it hit us: We were born remote, our strong culture has been a result of the efforts to feel closer in the distance, no matter where we are. This fact has always been a crucial part of our foundation.

So from a solid base of illustrations and animations, we decided to redesign and rethink our main website. We chose to scale the concept of the house to an entire city, where we are part of a wider environment where we all coexist in constant close communication with our surroundings, our colleagues, and our clients.

New site redesign at Leniolabs.

The concept through the site

Starting from the city view at the homepage where our house is part of a neighborhood was a way for us to express that we focus on nearshoring, increasing the teams of our clients where we merge with their daily routine and methodologies.

Animation of four ships sailing in San Francisco down the Golden Gate.

The culture section is our house from in and out, here we write about who we are, what we like, where we live, what we do in our free time, and how we like to share knowledge with the community.
Then each section of the site is represented with a room of our house, leaving our main essential topics on the first level of the navigation.

Gif of every section header showing each animation.

New Focus, new content

We spend some time writing content to explain every area of our expertise. Each partner took the time to write an article sharing their knowledge and experience of every field and technology they lead.

Focus on Community

We believe that sharing is the best way of growing; that's why we support many talented people that are developing the open-source frameworks and tools we use every day at Leniolabs; we owe them their time and knowledge and want them to keep pushing a better web for all. There is a complete section dedicated to the open-source projects we started supporting this year.

Open Collective and GitHub sponsors.

Our Lab keeps growing.

As active members of open-source, we develop our own tools and invite everyone to collaborate with them. That's what our lab section is for: web tools, games, and open source projects that are developed by our talented team, were selected to share here, but not only the apps and websites but the video talks, live coding sessions, and source files involved in them.

We have Layoutit! a free CSS Grid generator, Data Research a repo with open-source data visualizations, Restgis an API to get GeoJson, TopoJSON, or SVG of any map in the world, MyLenio our SaaS manager app, among other games and explorations.

Free alien goodies

In our culture section, we have many slack emojis, WhatsApp stickers, Instagram filters, and gifs of our alien mascot Leni, that you can download for free from our site or play with our Lenimatic generator to create your own.

Lenimatic, an alien generator to download SVG or PNG files with our mascot illustrations.
Some of our current slack emojis built with our mascot Leni.

We love easter eggs

You can come and visit the site at night, but also next winter, and maybe try another visit in January if you can :) there are tons of easter eggs hidden depending on the month and hour you visit us.

City changing the landscape depending time or year you visit the site.
Leni falls asleep when you visit the site at night.

Next Steps

As part of this new identity, we started redesigning all our internal document templates, our social media communication, and a new onboarding kit to deliver to our old and new employees around the globe. We are currently exploring new places where our brand continues to mutate and expand outside the screens and the digital environment.

Onboarding kit.
Social Media communication.

Thanks for reading! All feedback is welcome, hope you enjoy this article.