A unified visual language across campaigns, product, events, and the new 2026 website.
Who is Sonar
Sonar is the operations and billing platform internet service providers run on. Highly technical, deeply specialized, in a category dominated by spec sheets. My job is to make the brand sound like a product built by people who actually understand ISPs, and to ship a system marketing, product, and education can operate without design as a bottleneck.
The before
Generic enterprise blue. Marketing, product, and customer education each speaking a slightly different language. No grid, no voice, no documented system. The brand was 'fine.' That's the worst place a B2B brand can be: not bad enough to fix, not strong enough to compound. The first job was making it impossible to ignore that there was a problem.
The system
The 2026 system is short on rules and long on examples. Typography, color, and layout each carry one decision the rest of the brand defers to.
Typography
Inter Variable for everything except the display moment, where the wider weights anchor heroes and section openers. Mono for kickers and chips, never for body. The scale is a clean octave that compresses to mobile without the team needing to think about it.
Color
Navy is the room you walk into. Cyan is what makes you look. The system specifies which one carries which job, so a marketer building a landing page never negotiates hierarchy from scratch. Accessibility ratios are baked in, not audited after the fact.
Layout & voice
A modular bento layout that snaps to four content shapes, with gradient stops the team can reach for without picking colors by hand. Voice is short, declarative, never pitchy. Sonar speaks like an operator, because operators are the ones reading.
Photography direction
Sonar's site moved away from stock-feeling B2B tech imagery toward photography that looks like the people who actually use the product. ISP operators in their own field environments. The lighting cool, the framing honest, the color graded so it sits inside the navy / cyan system. Same direction notes apply across blog covers, persona pages, and product hubs.
Scope · 2023 → present
Numbers below are countable from the system. The qualitative ones (campaign systems, formats, frameworks) compound year over year and are harder to put a digit on. Both matter.
7
Sub-brand lockups built off the system
100+
Marketing assets shipped
6+
Templated marketing pages
3 yrs
Brand evolution end-to-end
1
Annual flagship event campaign system
01 · The documentary
Shot solo on-site in a one-day trip. Edited end-to-end. Another team member ran the interviews on camera. The piece is long-form, human, on-brand. A format the marketing team can repeat with different customers without losing the look.
02 · Scale Summit 2026
Scale Summit is Sonar's flagship event for the broadband industry. I turned it into a campaign system: one visual language across countdown microsite, LinkedIn sponsor reveals, email + paid hero visuals, merch, and a social media photo contest. Industry events live or die in the weeks before, not during, so the system had to hold attention through every drip. The events team now ships sponsor announcements on their own, and every surface still reads as the same event.
03 · Montréal photoshoot
A Montréal photoshoot I produced on-location with the team. Direction, styling, and a consistent treatment. Corporate B2B portraits usually end up stiff and interchangeable. The brief here was the opposite: keep the personality, keep the warmth, keep the color. Click any image to open full-size.
Proof · the system runs without me
Every product launch, every campaign vertical, every event format pulls from the same lockup grid. All built off the same system, none of them requiring a designer to start from a blank file. This is what the thesis means in practice: the system is the work.
