Refreshingly Accessible

AudioEye — brand refresh + CMS platform rebuild

Brand & Web Design Lead · Rebrand creative, web application, Storyblok builder design

Prismic → Storyblok · Launched April 2025

TLDR

We made a colour contrast checker that was easier for designers and developers to understand if they were achieving compliant contrast levels, and get further context into how colour contrast effects their users.

The team approached this in two phases, one initial test, and a follow up edit during a website transition.

Metric text

The gap

AudioEye sold a premium, human-plus-automation approach to web accessibility. The brand didn’t look like it.

Neon gradients, floating 3D shapes, big rounded type — the visual language of an early-stage SMB SaaS, attached to a mid-market and enterprise tool. Almost no people appeared in the imagery, despite a mission built entirely around people who use assistive technology. And the brand guide was thin enough that every new piece drifted a little further from the last.

Underneath it sat Prismic — a CMS the marketing team couldn’t preview reliably, couldn’t navigate quickly, and couldn’t publish to without a developer on standby.

IMAGE: Before — old brand collage. Old site, old deck, old ad. Show the drift between them.

The bet

Rebrand and replatform at the same time.

The risk was real: launching both together would blur attribution in post-launch analytics. The alternative was worse — rebuilding the entire site twice with a single marketing engineer, the second time on a foundation nobody liked.

We took the analytics hit and built what we actually wanted.

Core principles

Everything we're making has to answer the question: 'Is this accessible?' first. Accessibility wasn't an afterthought but a guiding principle throughout every stage of the redesign

Brand direction

Four decisions carried the identity.

Gold standard, not high energy.

Calmer, more solid, more considered — pedigree over momentum.

Contrast and legibility, never traded.

An accessible typeface tested against dyslexia and dyscalculia needs. Palettes built so both monochromatic and complementary combinations clear contrast requirements. An accessibility company’s brand has to pass its own audit.

Physical, not weightless.

Paper, brushstroke, scribble, plant material — texture replacing the intangible digital space.

A collage system, not an asset library.

A grid-based illustration framework combining real photography with representational iconography. One visual language stretched across sales collateral, advertising, video, and complex editorial illustration.

IMAGE: Brand system board — logo, type specimen, palette with contrast values, texture library.

IMAGE: Illustration system — 3–4 collage examples showing range from simple to complex.

Platform

The real users of the new CMS were the marketing team.

Storyblok replaced Prismic, but the migration wasn’t the design work — the builder was. I designed the component library and editing experience so that non-designers could publish pages that stayed consistent and accessible without a designer or developer reviewing them. Weekly syncs with our marketing engineer, hot-potato problem solving, and an information architecture built to absorb what was coming next: the blog rebuild and the AudioEyeQ learning platform.

Each fix mapped to a failure in the old system:

Old problem

What changed

No reliable preview → published mistakes

Live preview, 30-second publish (visibility of system status, error prevention)

Padding and text styles behaved unpredictably

Constrained, tokenized components (consistency and standards)

Web jargon unfamiliar to marketers

Plain-language field labels (match between system and real world)

Blog posts and pages hard to locate

Restructured content model (recognition rather than recall)

Developer overrides needed on key pages

Full self-serve editing (user control and freedom)

IMAGE: Storyblok builder — the editing view a marketer sees, annotated.

Results

The team

Before

After

Average page build time

25 min

6 min

Publish to live

7.5 min

30 sec

Ease of use rating

—

+150%

Page customization

—

+100%

In-tool collaboration

—

+50%

Being able to quickly make a page that looks good, is accessible, and doesn’t require any additional coding or help is incredible.

— Marketing team member

The site

Change

Lighthouse performance, desktop

+26%

Lighthouse performance, mobile

+20%

SEO score and traffic at launch

No drop

Holding SEO flat through a simultaneous rebrand and replatform was the outcome leadership was most worried about, and the one I’d point to first.

IMAGE: Metrics visual — before/after bars for build time and publish time.

The brand

Harder to measure, easy to see. Internally the identity now reads as a cool, intellectual guide rather than a friendly startup. It flexes across sleek sales collateral, presentations, advertising, and video without breaking, while still leaving room for complex illustration.

IMAGE: Applied collateral grid — sales deck, ad unit, video still, one-pager.

IMAGE: Before / after site comparison — 2–3 key pages side by side.

What it cost

Two decisions I’d handle differently.

Our marketing engineer argued for Radix as the UI foundation. Our head of product design preferred Joy UI. We went with Joy UI, and spent the following months working around its limits — thin marketing components and no accessible chart support in an accessibility product. I should have advocated harder for the person who’d be living in the codebase.

I also pushed to fit more design changes in before launch. Our digital marketing manager held the line, and she was right — the launch data stayed readable because the scope didn’t keep moving.

Where it left us

A brand system and a publishing platform that a small marketing team runs without a bottleneck, built to carry the blog rebuild and the AudioEyeQ learning platform that followed.

IMAGE: Closing — brand system in use across three surfaces, wide crop.