CAMP: Rebranding Staffbase’s Internal Events

CAMP: Rebranding Staffbase’s Internal Events

Turning a familiar brand element into a new visual system.

Turning a familiar brand element into a new visual system.

Brand

Staffbase

My Role

Senior Designer

Year

2026

Software

Figma, Adobe Illustrator

Figma, Adobe Illustrator

01

The brief

Staffbase had just rebranded its intranet and wanted a stronger internal identity built around the theme of CAMP. Town Hall would become Campfire, Onboarding would become Basecamp, and the internal app would become Campsite, the naming was already locked in when the project reached me. I designed the visual identity that holds it all together: the CAMP symbol, the lockups, the app icon, and the motion assets. What did not exist was a way to make four names feel like one family. So the real question was not what Campfire should look like. It was: what single shape can carry all four names, survive being shrunk to an app icon, and still read as Staffbase?

02

Looking inward before drawing anything

The symbol was already in the brand. I did not want to invent a new shape. Anything drawn from scratch would have needed years of use before it meant anything to employees. So I went back to what already existed. The Staffbase speech bubble has a small triangular tail at the top, the point where every Staffbase conversation begins. That tail is a triangle, a triangle is a tent, and a tent is a camp. I just had to isolate it.

The symbol was already in the brand. The symbol was already in the brand. I did not want to invent a new shape. Anything drawn from scratch would have needed years of use before it meant anything to employees. So I went back to what already existed. The Staffbase speech bubble has a small triangular tail at the top, the point where every Staffbase conversation begins. That tail is a triangle, a triangle is a tent, and a tent is a camp. I just had to isolate it.

Instead of introducing a completely new shape, I looked inward and found the answer in the tip of the bubble.

Instead of introducing a completely new shape, I looked inward and found the answer in the tip of the bubble.

03

Shaping the symbol

Extracting the triangle was the easy part. The raw tail is tuned for the letter A in the Staffbase wordmark, so it had to sit inside the A of BASECAMP, CAMPFIRE and CAMPSITE without breaking the rhythm of the type, and still hold up alone as an icon. I ran it through a wide set of geometric variations, testing each one twice: isolated, then set inside the wordmark at real size. Two came out ahead on clarity, symbolism and scale.

04

Testing visual directions, and killing one

One colour per entity solves today’s problem and creates next year’s. The obvious colour move was one per entity: blue for Basecamp, orange for Campfire. It works, and I built the full set to see it properly. Then I asked what happens when the fifth entity arrives, and the sixth. A one-colour-per-entity system runs out of distinct colours fast, and every addition either muddies the set or gets a leftover colour that means nothing. The gradient had no ceiling, and it matched the updated Staffbase visual language. I killed the colour-coded version because it solved today’s problem and created next year’s.

05 & 06

05 & 06

Refinement rounds one and two

The first version was deliberately plain: a solid gradient triangle inside the A, across all four names, plus lockups with the Staffbase logo to test how parent and system sat together. Seeing all four together confirmed the system worked, and exposed the problem; a plain triangle is a triangle. The camp idea only lands because the word next to it says CAMP. The first attempt at making it read as a tent was a small orange flag at the peak. It gave the symbol character at large sizes, broke the silhouette at small ones, and introduced a second colour that fought the gradient. The second attempt kept the flag and added crossed camp poles, which did the job the flag was reaching for, structurally rather than decoratively.

07

Refinement round 3: poles and ropes

This is the version that made it. Round three dropped the flag and built the tent from the poles alone, with a thin rope line down each side of the gradient face. It holds inside the wordmark, works as a standalone mark, and at small sizes the poles are the first thing you recognise.

08

The app icon, and the round trip

I started with the tent cropped tight in a rounded square, tested against a real App Store listing so I could judge it at the size people actually see. Then I tested the Staffbase smile instead, the argument was recognition: it is the shape employees already trust. Our CMO and art director pushed back, and the reasoning held: making the app icon the exception meant the one place employees see the brand most often would be the one place the system did not apply. So it went back to the tent. Being talked out of the smile made the system stronger, a good idea in isolation, a bad idea inside a system built on one constant.

I started with the tent cropped tight in a rounded square, tested against a real App Store listing so I could judge it at the size people actually see. Then I tested the Staffbase smile instead, the argument was recognition: it is the shape employees already trust. Our CMO and art director pushed back, and the reasoning held: making the app icon the exception meant the one place employees see the brand most often would be the one place the system did not apply. So it went back to the tent. Being talked out of the smile made the system stronger, a good idea in isolation, a bad idea inside a system built on one constant.

09

Putting it into the intranet

Campsite went live first, so the logo had to work in a real interface rather than on a slide. The header is a tight fixed-height row that also holds the Staffbase mark, search, and full navigation. I tested three colour treatments in that exact context, then the flag variant and a single-line layout, which is what the header actually needed once the real nav items were in.

Campsite went live first, so the logo had to work in a real interface rather than on a slide. The header is a tight fixed-height row that also holds the Staffbase mark, search, and full navigation. I tested three colour treatments in that exact context, then the flag variant and a single-line layout, which is what the header actually needed once the real nav items were in.

10

Motion

The origin story is the most convincing argument for the whole system. I animated the construction because watching the bubble tail separate and become a tent explains in four seconds what a slide takes a paragraph to say. Everything shipped on solid and transparent backgrounds, so the team could use it in decks, Campsite posts and event screens without coming back to me for a new file.

11

The final system

Four names, one symbol, one gradient. A set of lockups that work with or without the Staffbase mark above them. I handed over production files in dark and light for every entity, so anyone in the company could pull the right logo without coming back to design.

12

Outcome

The shape was already in the logo. The work was not inventing a symbol, it was noticing one, then spending three rounds making sure it could carry four names, a nav bar, an app icon and whatever internal comms adds next.