Cint: brand refresh at scale

The inheritance

I joined the Lucid marketing team in the winter of 2021, midway through Cint’s acquisition of Lucid. Lucid retired the brand soon after, and we inherited a brand that wasn’t initially ours. The three years that followed were quieter than a rebrand. The work was to understand the inherited system before touching it: what it could carry, where it strained, and what a global B2B company this size actually needed from its design.

The rebuild

By 2024, the brand was due for more than upkeep. The refresh began with conversations between marketing and company leadership, then progressed through months of research, concepting, and stakeholder reviews before one direction emerged.

I worked on it alongside our Creative Director and the product design team, then did the part that decides whether a refresh is real: I carried it across every surface the company shows up on. Booths, events, video, print, and the website. The new site went live in January 2025.

One system, everywhere

Here is the part that is easy to miss. For most of this, the in-house design team was two people. The only way two people cover a global company’s entire visual output is to stop treating each piece as a one-off and build a system that carries them all. One brand, stretched on purpose across everything it needed to be.

Campaigns · Content · Events · Booths · Presentations · Videos
· Long-form · Social & internal templates · Newsletters · Display ads
· Landing pages · Website · Product pages

Some of this I owned end-to-end. Other parts, like the website, were a team effort with our UI and dev partners. All of it had to feel like one company.

On the floor

The most public test was the events. In a single year, the system traveled to New York, Chicago, Miami Beach, Atlanta, and London, each city getting a version of one idea rather than a new one built from scratch.

In print

Events are what people photograph. The reports are what they actually read. For a research company, a real part of the brand is the arguments it makes in public, so the long-form work had to be as considered as anything on a show floor.

We built it as a system, not a pile of PDFs: reports for timely data stories, guides for the how-to, whitepapers for the deeper positions, each with its own rules for length, structure, and pace.

Looking good was the baseline. The harder part was making each piece carry as much weight visually as the research inside it.

In motion

The brand also had to move. On social, that meant a template I could drop over timely footage and turn around fast. In campaigns, it meant type and shape doing the work, the same brand language animated.

Cint’s whole pitch is access to the largest network of real people anywhere, and the motion work kept returning to that one image: people seen from above, at a scale no single frame can hold.

In the culture

The truest test of whether a brand has taken hold is not external. It is whether a company will use it on itself. Working with the HR team, I turned Cint’s values into something employees could earn: a set of recognition badges, one per value, built from the brand’s own shapes.

The care extended beyond the office. When a teammate had a baby, the same brand showed up on a onesie waiting for them. The same shapes mark how long people stay, too, from a first anniversary to a twentieth.

We never lost sight of flexing our brand-play muscles and crafting designs that spark curiosity in our colleagues. In the end, not everything needed a business case. Some of it just had to be worth peeling off a sheet.

Testimonial

“Jonathan is an excellent designer, and brilliant brand strategist… a true collaborator and is respected and valued by his peers.”

Marc de Schweinitz, former Senior Director,
Performance & Growth Marketing