Upsight
INTRO
My Role
Creative direction and brand design
User experience and UI design
Advertising creative and strategy
Sales and pitch development
Rebrand and naming strategy
Event and conference design
Client/Context
Upsight
Year
2013-2015
Category
Mobile Marketing & Analytics Platform
Kontagent Playhaven cobrand and rebrand to Upsight
Rebranding in Real-time
Setting the tone for success
When the merger happened, Playhaven supported over 20,000 games and 176+ million monthly active users, generating 400 billion in-game events collectively between Kontagent and Playhaven. We quickly designed a co-branded logo, produced whitepapers for trade shows and created slide decks to equip sales teams.
We did our homework: conducting interviews, competitive research, and testing colors, messaging, and visual treatments. At one point, we were literally working under the placeholder name Newco as we aligned with executives and refined the direction.
Competive landscape, color and early Newco exploration artifacts
Up and to the right
After all the rigorous testing and naming, the winning idea started from an engineer. He pointed out that our customers all wanted their metrics to go up and to the right, so why not call the company Upright? That name didn’t quite work, but in a serendipitous typo, we stumbled upon Upsight, a word that means having a deep understanding of something and applying that insight to a broader context. It was perfect.
We had already developed dozens of strong visual treatments, refining our messaging and design language with leaders across the company. Applying it to existing concepts was quick. We reviewed with the executive team daily and everything fell into place when the right name met the right design.
Upsight was born, and everyone loved it.
Brand treatment explorations, logo concepts and final Upsight approved logo and colors
Merging Two Product Platforms
Combining Superpowers
How do you merge two fully operational platform products—each with its own UI/UX patterns, codebase, SDKs, and data integrations - without making it feel like a patchwork solution? Just like our branding efforts, our goal was to ensure that Upsight felt and operated like a unified product suite, not two systems stitched together.
We took a strategic approach, similar to how third-party blogs and websites maintain consistency: we started with a unified global header navigation for a quick and seamless rollout. From there, we systematically updated, prototyped, and refined each major feature—combining overlapping patterns, transitioning to a state-based overlay system, and standardizing typefaces, colors, and design tokens along the way.
To the untrained eye, the platform merge was seamless. Behind the scenes, some clever SDK work—offering a modular "bundle only what you need" approach—ensured a smooth transition. Within a year, all customers had successfully migrated to the new system, right on schedule.
By this point, Upsight powered over 25,000 active apps, 700 million monthly active users, and 500 billion monthly events. The platform had stabilized, but it was clear: a refresh was on the horizon.
Merged global header navigation with updated Kontagent and Playhaven features available
A Refreshed Experience
A year after the merger, we had launched the new brand, merged products, migrated customers, and resumed selling to new clients. But one thing was clear—while the rebrand and platform were solid, they needed a fresh new flavor.
We embarked on a holistic, end-to-end refresh dubbed Project Orange Juice, covering everything from the app platform and SDK to the website and brand identity. Customers loved our signature orange, but other elements were starting to feel outdated.
This time, we had more creative and technical freedom. We built a new UI framework from the ground up, leveraging atomic design principles, refined product positioning, and a code-first design approach to maintain a scalable design system.
But this wasn’t just a product refresh—it was a full-scale brand evolution. The design and marketing teams executed:
New video content,
Multiple marketing whitepapers,
Direct HubSpot integrations,
Revamped sales PowerPoint decks, and
A full suite of paid media campaign assets.
To top it off, we made a bold statement by hosting a GDC event at San Francisco City Hall—cementing our position as a leader in the industry.
The snippet of the refreshed Upsight experience code-named "Orange Julius" based on atomic design principles
v1 of the homepage to the v2 concept homepage "OJ"
Bespoke Strategy and Creative Support
Taking customer success seriously
Many customers simply signed up integrated the SDK and started deploying features. Top clients including ABC News, Activision, Bandai Namco, Disney, EA, Glu Mobile, Grindr, Pokémon, Tango, Ubisoft, Viacom, WB - sought our expertise to increase IAP revenue and Daily Active Users (DAUs).
This often took many forms:
Developing concept prototypes to visualize potential solutions
Creating presentations to help customer success managers
Running pilot programs to test new engagement strategies
Producing paid media creative to optimize campaign performance
Custom slide decks, experience proposals and bespoke ad creative deployed for various clients
My Takeaways
Understand the Medium You’re Designing For
My team didn’t just build websites and integrations—we developed a useful design system because I encouraged them to learn functional code. Understanding the technical side made collaboration with platform engineers and complex systems smoother, allowing us to speak the same language and stay closely connected to the working product.
Focus on the Business
Many of our clients had in-house creative teams, so why did they turn to Upsight? The key was our deep understanding of their business. We didn’t just deliver creative assets—we recommended data-driven mobile strategies that directly aligned with their goals. The real creativity wasn’t just in the visuals—it was in the strategy.
The Power of Flexibility
One of Upsight’s most successful products was DataMine, a SQL editing product. Was it easy to use? Sure. But what truly set it apart wasn’t just a sleek UI—it was its flexibility. By allowing customers to find insights they hadn’t anticipated while still providing deep interaction with their data, we created a tool that was both powerful and indispensable.
PROJECT DEEP-DIVES
