When Project Oxford was looking to rebrand as Cognitive Services with Microsoft’s premier dev focused event, Build fast approaching, we brought it to market in 9 weeks.
We created a campaign to capture the hearts and minds of devs everywhere looking to make their projects smarter and easier to interact with: "Give Your Apps A Human Side". The tagline speaks directly to the ease of use and modular nature of the APIs while providing the value story with a playful wink.
I created an icon system to mirror the process devs follow when searching for APIs. The first step in this search is the category. To echo this we created shapes to represent the five categories of the collection: Vision, Speech, Language, Search, and Knowledge. Within these shapes we designed simple iconography to inform the user as to what the API does. This gave us icons that act as a two part roadmap as the user searches for what they need on the Azure Marketplace.
Once the brand was established, it needed legs. I worked closely with leadership to develop a strategy to maximize impact within the pre-configured marketing plan.
The new look launched during the Build 2016 keynote, devs grabbed API keys by the thousands, and the positive press rolled in. After the re-launch more than a million users were added to the community.