Aptrinsic / Gainsight PX 2017–2020 • built solo, end to end
Role: Sole founding designer • Principal UX Designer
Explore the companion 🚀 Flagship Case Study for the eight-year survival thesis, the Gainsight acquisition narrative, and the Knowledge Center Bot redesign.
Some teams want to see not a finished brand but how one is made—how a designer takes initial material and develops it. This companion does that twice: first the brand identity, derived step by step from almost nothing; then the full site that carried it, and the acquisition it survived.
How a four-color kit became a living brand.
The molecule. What I was handed fit on a single sheet: a wordmark, the “ap” smile, a badge, and four colors—#55565a, #dbd9d6, #0db14c, #ffa400. An outside firm had drawn it. There was no character, no illustration, no world, no voice—a static mark and a palette, nothing more.
That sheet was the DNA. Everything that follows was derived from it, one logical step at a time, as Sales, Marketing, and the product itself asked for more. The smile became a face; the face learned to see; the green became a signal you’d recognize before reading a word. Not a finished brand—a molecule becoming a living system.
Fig. 1. Aptrinsic logo kit: the “aptrinsic” wordmark with a green smile under “ap” (on white, dark-gray, and green), an “ap” logomark grid, three circular “ap” badges, and the four-color palette—dark gray, light gray, green, and orange—no more, no less.
The first world: launch, then exploration. The first thing I derived. I read the smile as an invitation into a friendlier, clearer corner of enterprise SaaS, and took the rocket as a seed for one idea—launch, in the broadest sense. From it grew a line-art world of exploration, with Aptrinsic as the vehicle that opens new territory. Through all of it the green-and-orange pairing carried recognition, and the smile stayed present without ever being the loudest thing in the frame.
Fig. 2. A line-art illustration set on a space-exploration theme—rocket, astronaut holding an “ap” flag, planet, satellite, rover, a data flow into an analytics dashboard, hands holding a house of smiling faces, a magnet, a balloon, a robot, and a heart-carrying drone—in gray with green and orange accents.
The world, applied. The same language, put to work. Over roughly six months, in parallel with my UX work, I built leaflets and LinkedIn campaigns on demand, each tuned to a specific message—adoption, growth, retention. The icons carried meaning, not decoration: caring hands for retention, a roof for protection, a friendly machine for automation.
Fig. 3. A two-page product brochure and three LinkedIn promoted-ad mockups in the line-art style. Headlines include “Build Products Your Customers Love”; customer logos Folloze, GuideSpark, Metadata.io, Box, Clarizen; a testimonial from Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer.
The character, and the system around it. A world can say where; it can’t tell the story of a person. So everything came back to Earth around a character—a young product leader who finds a pair of glasses and suddenly sees his own product in a light that had been hidden from him.
The green glasses are the whole promise in one object: seeing what others can’t, with the “ap” riding along as a small white pin—recognizable, never shouting. Then the derivations became parts: the wordmark in fixed lockups, the four colors locked with values, the character built out as a pose library, and a spot-icon set any campaign could draw from. After this, “on brand” stopped being a judgment call and became a set of components.
Fig. 4. Brand-system sheet: the wordmark in three color treatments, the “ap” logomark grid and badges, the four-color palette with values, the green-sweater/green-glasses character in a range of poses, a spot-icon set, the vertical “Turn Your Product Into a Growth Engine” poster, and flat workplace scenes of diverse teams.
The character in motion. His debut in movement—a still from one of the silent Facebook films. In a leadership meeting, Sales has bookings and Customer Success has retention; Product has no story to tell. He discovers Aptrinsic and changes, his sweater shifting orange to green—the two inherited colors doing the work of before-and-after—until the product itself launches off the screen. The whole system, alive for the first time.
Fig. 5. Still from a silent animated Facebook ad: the transformed green-sweater, green-glasses product leader presents a “Return on Product Investment” chart to a seated team in a meeting room.