Scaling BuildingConnected's brand for a fast-growing industry

BuildingConnected is the largest construction network that connects owners and builders through an easy-to-use platform to streamline the bid and risk management process in preconstruction. Their tools, used by owners, general contractors, and subcontractors centralize workflows so teams can collaborate in real time, minimizing duplicate work or missed opportunities in the planning phase before shovel hits the ground.

Since joining BuildingConnected in 2017 as the first Brand Designer, the company had grown from a trusted startup to an enterprise company in a very short time. This fast growth allowed little time to explore a holistic brand that could scale at this range alongside our daily tasks and marketing campaigns.

We wanted a brand that could tell our story with authenticity, reflect our unique mission and culture, one that the entire company could be proud of. We had a well-designed product with a passionate team on fire to truly help people in the industry.

In undertaking this, there were several specifics we wanted to address:

• Creating a brand system that would allow us to scale a suite of products while retaining flexibility for creativity

• Developing templates that would enable us to springboard projects with greater speed and efficiency

• Exploring how to unify the broader platform of products included in Autodesk Construction Cloud

• Addressing our long and cumbersome name/logo

Surveying the landscape

Before exploring visual directions, we did months of extensive research as a backbone for our brand compass, consisting of our vision, mission, brand pillars, values, and purpose—the main “why” driving our organization. This gave us a strong base to explore visual elements laddering up to these solid findings.

Key findings:

• This is a relationship-based industry built on trust. The largest network of over 1 million construction professionals on our platform is what differentiates us.

• Dustin's story humanizes the brand. We are here to serve the people in construction. We care about people and we're more than just a product.

• Technology feels so far removed to our customers, but they still want an easier process to save them time and money.

Depending on our audience and goals, we could leverage the brand pillars to tell our story authentically. As we were creating our style guide we kept going back to the main purpose of our brand, making sure that the mission came through in every design decision we made.

Laying Foundation

In the time of 6 months, we had conducted research, synthesized our findings, developed main concepts, designed a new logo, and started a basic styleguide. We were beginning to get to the nitty-gritty of templatizing and revising all materials from the brand audit.

Then we got unfortunate news that we needed to halt the project, indefinitely. We had kept stakeholders involved all the way through, but this decision was coming from someone higher up at our parent company. We had meetings with various people seeking context of the decision, but ultimately, there were organizational changes that were out of our control.

Main takeaways

This was one of my first times officially leading a team. I improved my skills on hosting meetings, scheduling, making sure we had a clear outline, reviewing questions and next steps at the end, following up afterward. I learned how the group worked best and played to the strengths each designer brought. I learned to balance my feedback and drive direction while inspiring my team to find answers and push the work forward all together.

If the project continued as planned, we would have:

• continued to test our brand perception pre-launch

• implemented all new brand materials for the launch date

• educated all teams internally, holding open office hours for any questions or requests

• wrapped up any loose ends and requests during our post-launch plan

• collaborated with Demand Generation to test email and ad campaigns, knowing brand sentiment is measured over time

We were merging with Autodesk faster than the anticipated timeline, but this dedicated time to our brand gave us better footing for design strategy across the unified construction platform we were advancing towards. Our end goal was not to make a flashy brand for the sake of solely our organization, but to be a springboard for processes that would yield better work and a more unified design system. Though we started from our customers, team, and values, we made our decisions with Autodesk and the greater goal of unifying construction in mind.

Brand Director: Justin Chuan
Brand Team: Gio Wilentz, Daniel Millan, Jenny Montalvo, Patrick Perkins, Michael Everitt