Relate
Rebranding and redesigning an enterprise AI product for the modern AI era, across identity, system, product, and marketing site.
The brief
Relate is an AI agent that joins online meetings on Teams, Google Meet, and Zoom, summarizes what people say and how they say it, and produces a trust-factor analysis teams can act on. The model is trained on the principles of The Trusted Advisor.
Relate had a brand and an interface that predated the modern AI era. The existing identity was a detailed mesh-network mark in a visual language that read as generic tech. The product had real enterprise customers but felt visually fractured, with patterns that looked like several designers had worked on different parts of it without speaking to each other.
The brief was to bring Relate into the present across the full surface, identity, design system, product, and marketing site, without flattening into the generic AI aesthetic that had become the category default.
Role and team
The team spanned five timezones. Hide and Seek led the engagement with a design lead and dev lead in Australia. I joined as a contractor in the US, owning brand identity, interaction design, the design system, and the marketing site. Real-time overlap was at most three hours a day, so video updates and written documentation became the operational backbone.
What I owned
- Brand identity (rebrand from existing brand)
- Interaction design across the product
- The design system, layered on HASTE
- The marketing site (relate.us)
What the team contributed
- Hide and Seek design lead — led the design deliverables and oversaw the engagement
- Hide and Seek dev lead — built the architecture and pipeline, managed the dev teams in Taiwan and Australia
- UX designer (Malaysia, contractor) — UX deliverables under the design lead’s supervision
- Product dev team (Taiwan, contracted by Relate) — built the product
- Marketing site dev team (Australia) — built relate.us
- Business analyst (UK, Relate) — requirements and business context
- Marketing manager (US, Relate) — content, copy, and marketing direction
- CFO and CEO (Sydney, Relate) — executive stakeholders and final approvals
The work across four surfaces
Brand identity rebrand
A brand workshop surfaced statements, keywords, and intent. From that material I derived two archetypes: Creator at 70% (originality, deliberate construction, business-level trustworthiness) and Magician at 30% (transformation, possibility, the catalytic moment). I presented three identity directions grounded in the archetype split with typography, color, and brand applications. The team selected the direction anchored in an abstract handshake mark with a blue-to-pink gradient.
Design system layered on HASTE
The product DS was layered on HASTE, the tokenized design system I had built earlier at Hide and Seek. HASTE provided the headless foundation: base components and foundation tokens. On top, I added Relate’s brand-token layer (colors, font families, sizing, spacing, elevation, border radius), fully tokenized. The new Relate-specific components, including the Sandi chat surface, were not fully tokenized — a deliberate trade-off given the timeline.
Product redesign and Sandi’s surface
The new product reads calm. Soft ivory rather than sterile white. Hints of gradient appear across the UI to carry the Magician layer of the brand. Relate’s AI agent has a name: Sandi. I designed a dedicated mark for Sandi and built the chat surface that handles a complete state machine: idle, processing, error, usage limit, AI model selection.
Marketing site (relate.us)
The marketing site had to capture multiple B2B audiences: HR leads, sales teams, project teams, and customer success teams. The site’s posture is intentionally calm. No flashy hero animations, no kinetic typography, no unexpected interactions. Trust products don’t earn credibility through visual excess; they earn it through restraint, clarity, and consistency with the product itself.
What I’d revisit
Working across five time zones shaped how the work moved. Decisions unfolded asynchronously rather than within single conversations, which suited a team this distributed, and the rhythm became its own thing to design for. That kind of constraint asks the system to do more documentation work, since async teams rely on what’s written down more than on what’s said in the room. Something I’d carry into how I scope documentation on future distributed engagements.
We put most of the personality into the brand system and kept the product deliberately restrained. People came to Relate to understand conversations, not admire the interface.
The brand, the product, the design system, and the marketing site all shipped from the same source: a brand workshop, two archetypes, and a coherent set of decisions that traced from intent to interface across every surface a user encounters.
Less is more
Working on Relate changed how I think about interfaces in the AI era. Throughout the project, I repeatedly found that adding more visual expression didn’t make the product feel stronger. The stronger direction was usually the quieter one.
Clear hierarchy, restrained motion, and content that stayed focused on the conversation itself consistently felt more credible than more visually expressive alternatives. We put most of the personality into the brand and let the product focus on helping people interpret what was being said in meetings.