Reimagine your place in the world.

DigitalOcean, sporting a literal 99designs logo, wanted to move upmarket and shift from hosting staging environments to real apps. They needed a brand that would represent this shift while maintaining its developer-friendly brand.

After attempts with multiple branding studios, Califa worked with the team and Kasia Bojanowska on an internal rebrand that accomplished and exceeded these goals.

Heap captured every click, tap, and form fill on its own, without engineers tagging events. Few buyers knew it. The brand led with the technology, talked about features rather than outcomes, and never said the product was easy. Next to Mixpanel, Amplitude, and FullStory, it sounded like one more analytics tool.

Heap wanted to sound like a challenger. Califa ran the rebrand with Fictive Kin and tested three directions: Expansion, Annotation, and Illumination. Illumination won, because Heap’s job was to show teams what their data had been hiding.

The pink hexagon gave way to a mark made of bars and a bright teal, with glowing lines and high contrast built into the system.

Unify’s product was ahead of its story. The old line, “Growth, Engineered,” explained the machine to sales and growth leaders who only cared what it produced. It still spoke to startups, and in a category where everyone sold “all-in-one,” buyers couldn’t see what Unify actually did.

Califa ran the rebrand with Company Policy and rebuilt the story around the customer: plain-spoken in a category full of AI hype, and organized around one arc, from market to moment to momentum.

The identity follows. A red, pushed past orange, stands apart from a category of blues and purples. A glow marks anything in motion. The italic wordmark read as streetwear, so it was redrawn upright, keeping the ligatures that join “un” and “fy.” The new symbol is two halves locking into the same “un.”