Spoke
Spoke
Brand strategy and identity for Spoke, the communications platform for regulated industries, merging two brands into one and giving a challenger the confidence to stand apart from the biggest communications providers in the world.
The Context
Spoke is the communications platform for regulated industries: finance, insurance, healthcare. It's where some of life's most important conversations happen, and where being human is hardest because compliance comes first. The business had grown for years as a phone and comms platform, but AI changed what it could offer: tools that listen to live conversations, coach teams toward better outcomes, and keep them compliant in real time. With that growth came the need to merge two brands into one and set the business up for its next stage.
The challenge was sharp. Spoke's customers are Fortune 500 companies, and its competitors are the largest, most established communications providers in the world, names like Cisco and RingCentral. The brand had to signal it was enterprise-grade, yet stand apart in a sea of sameness where trust is signalled through safe, conventional, corporate design.
The challenge was sharp. Spoke's customers are Fortune 500 companies, and its competitors are the largest, most established communications providers in the world, names like Cisco and RingCentral. The brand had to signal it was enterprise-grade, yet stand apart in a sea of sameness where trust is signalled through safe, conventional, corporate design.
The Identity
The strategy centred on a single organising thought: conversations that move your business forward. Talking, done well, makes things better for people and for business. From this came the brand platform Talking Progress. AI marks a new dawn of technical possibility, so we drew on the last one: 1950s America, full of energy and confidence. Where most brands working with AI and people reach for the same humanising tropes, we looked instead to corporate optimism, that mid-century belief that design and technology could advance business and everyday life.
The identity is rooted in mid-century modernism, drawing on Paul Rand and Saul Bass: high-contrast forms, hand-cut edges, and expressive asymmetry with movement in it. At its heart is a suite of pictograms that bring the brand idea to life. Communication symbols are reimagined as characters who walk, embodying forward progress. Built from bold, simplified silhouettes, each has personality and motion, turning everyday comms icons into a cast of distinctive, ownable figures. Spoke embraced them so fully they were built as 3D models. Around them sits a flexible speech bubble graphic that houses messaging at any scale, and a photography treatment inspired by split-screen film, making both sides of a human conversation visible in a world of corporate stock photography cliché.
The identity is rooted in mid-century modernism, drawing on Paul Rand and Saul Bass: high-contrast forms, hand-cut edges, and expressive asymmetry with movement in it. At its heart is a suite of pictograms that bring the brand idea to life. Communication symbols are reimagined as characters who walk, embodying forward progress. Built from bold, simplified silhouettes, each has personality and motion, turning everyday comms icons into a cast of distinctive, ownable figures. Spoke embraced them so fully they were built as 3D models. Around them sits a flexible speech bubble graphic that houses messaging at any scale, and a photography treatment inspired by split-screen film, making both sides of a human conversation visible in a world of corporate stock photography cliché.
The Outcome
Spoke operates where conversations carry real consequence: a health result, a claim, a financial decision. By making compliant communication feel human, the brand helps those conversations build trust and move things forward. It has created strong differentiation in a conservative, quietly designed category. Spoke's presence at conferences and in direct marketing is now highly ownable and driving awareness and growth, and since launching the rebrand they've realised one of the key goals of the project: winning a Fortune 50 customer, one of the fifty largest companies in the world. Rather than treating regulation as a burden, Spoke champions the important work done by regulated industries, giving the teams inside them a brand as human as the conversations they're trying to have.
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