Monsters behind glass

Decadis helps companies make the digital world work for them. With services in Atlassian Solutions, Data Analytics, Database Marketing and Individual Software, Decadis is a reliable partner for connecting people and for making use of data, communication, processes and organizations. As an Atlassian Platinum Marketplace Partner, the focus is on developing high-quality apps and services for the Atlassian Marketplace, which more than twelve million users and the largest companies in the world work with every day.

When Decadis approached us, the redesign of the corporate identity was already in its final stages. With a new logo for Decadis AG, a coordinated color palette and a matching font pairing, BESPOKE Marketing GmbH had created more than just a basis for a visual identity. There was already a pool of iconography, and every app on the Atlassian Marketplace had its own specially designed monster for visual recognition.

The next milestone was the redesign and development of the website for the company's 18th anniversary. In the course of the rebranding, the website of the Atlassian division, which had been run independently until then, was to be integrated into the website of the company as a whole. The aim was a coherent, unified experience for users, built with Webflow. The new website was to act as a digital business card and raise awareness of the company among potential clients, new employees and existing members of staff. For that, a customer journey was to be designed that leads the user's eye through the site and visually encourages them, with fun and wit, to go deeper and finally trigger an interaction. In short: conversion through storytelling.

After a full-day briefing at the offices of Decadis AG in Koblenz, a Webflow workshop with everyone responsible followed at Studio WAGEMUT in Düsseldorf. The chemistry was right, and everyone involved was up for the project. We started with the wireframe of the home page in Simon Sinek's golden circle, communication from the inside out. Besides a mega menu to introduce the apps properly, it was important to offer the target audiences different entry points into relevant content. The wireframe was signed off fairly quickly, and the first moods followed. For those we asked Decadis and ourselves: where does our story begin, and which stylistic direction do we want to take? After an intensive competitive analysis it was clear that most of the industry had one thing in common: the use of isometric illustrations and iconography. Almost every site was plastered with them, which is why they all looked pretty much the same. The easy route would have been to adapt the existing pool of illustrations to the new corporate design. But that would have made the Decadis site look like that of every other contender in the shark tank of the competition. What if, instead, we transferred the existing 2D illustrations of the monsters into the 3D world and gave the whole thing more depth?

At one point in the correspondence the remark came up that Atlassian products with the Decadis apps unlock the full power of the applications. Since every monster stands for a particular app, we put everything on one card here, which is normally untypical for the way moods are worked out. So the wild monsters were built out in Blender 3D, and we then put them into a kind of glass prison that they naturally want to break out of in order to demonstrate their full power. The rest is history.

Our thanks at this point go to the entire Decadis project management team for the terrific collaboration and the trust they placed in us. You are wagemutig!