Thoughts · Essay · 8 min read
The accessibility audit that lowkey turned into a visual identity refresh.
How a modest to-do list about color contrast became Project Catalyst, and what two years of doing the work actually taught us.
Thoughts · Essay · 8 min read
How a modest to-do list about color contrast became Project Catalyst, and what two years of doing the work actually taught us.
There’s a version of this story where we tell you we always knew it would be this big.
We didn’t.
When Brand Design and Product Design teams at SurveyMonkey first started talking seriously, the conversation was modest. Our accessibility scores needed work. Some of our color choices weren’t meeting contrast standards. We had a to-do list, not a vision.
That conversation, and the work that followed, became Project Catalyst: a full visual identity refresh launched in August that touches everything from our product UI to our marketing, our type system to the way our design components behave at scale.
Here’s what we learned along the way.
Accessibility brought us to the color system. And once we were in it, we asked a question we’d been sitting on: do our colors contribute to who we are, or work against us? Can color move people?
That question, not just “do these colors meet contrast standards together?” but “what are these colors actually supposed to do?”, is where Brand Design and Product Design started working side by side for real, not just in parallel. We’ve always been separate disciplines with our own roadmaps, our own backlogs, our own stakeholders. But a visual identity isn’t something you can split down the middle. Typography choices that work in a product component have to hold up on a billboard. Motion principles that feel right on a landing page have to feel right inside the app.
You can’t answer “who are we?” in two rooms and expect the same answer.
So we stopped trying. One team. One source of truth. More debates than we expected, and better outcomes than we probably deserved.
If you’re working in design right now, you know what happened between when we started this project and today. Generative AI went from “interesting demo” to “unavoidable conversation” faster than most industries could process.
Generating design assets with AI is genuinely controversial. Practitioners have real, principled disagreements about authorship, craft, quality, and consistency. Those arguments are worth having. But we weren’t going to resolve an industry debate. We had to make a decision for this project.
What we landed on: AI is not the savior and not the boogeyman. It’s a tool with real constraints and real applications, and our job was to be specific about which was which.
We didn’t let AI generate our identity. Type, color, motion, tone, the spirit of what this looks like: those are human decisions that require judgment from knowing the product, the brand, and the customer. What AI did earn was a role in execution: moving faster between ideation and production, scaling assets efficiently, exploring variations more quickly than we could manually. Not a replacement for design thinking. A multiplier for design capacity.
“As a Creative, I was skeptical. AI was never going to do the thinking for me, and it didn’t have to. What it did was eliminate the work that wasn’t thinking. Tasks that used to take hours now take seconds. That time didn’t disappear. It went back into the work that actually mattered.”
Here’s the part of this story that doesn’t get enough credit. You can do all the research in the world, arrive at a beautiful and thoughtful visual identity, and then watch it fall apart in production because the delivery mechanism wasn’t built to hold it.
For Brand Design, the design system is our single source of truth. Color tokens, typography scales, motion specs, component behavior: all of it lives there. There’s no “final_final_v2” file floating around. The design system is what’s true.
For teams across the organization, from product to regional teams to our agencies, it’s how they pick up the new visual language without starting from scratch. We were never going to ask everyone to stop and rebuild, so we built a system that lets a team adopt the new identity incrementally: new color tokens that slot into existing components, updated typography that layers in without a full redesign, and guidance clear enough that a team in a different time zone can make the right call without waiting overnight for a reply in Slack.
“Our design system has two customers. Our own team, who need to move fast and craft consistently at scale. And the person using SurveyMonkey, who needs the product to feel intuitive, insightful, and unmistakably ours.”
The design system turned a visual identity into infrastructure. That’s the difference between an identity that ships everywhere and a beautiful deck that lives in Figma.
A lot of conversations. A lot of audits of what exists, why it exists, and whether it still needs to. We looked at every place SurveyMonkey shows up, in product, in marketing, and in the edge cases where both overlap, and asked the same question repeatedly: does this serve who we are today?
Some things the research confirmed. Some things it challenged. Some things we were surprised to find we’d never formally decided. We’d just inherited them.
The research also gave us something harder to name: confidence. Not certainty. Confidence. The kind that comes from knowing you didn’t skip steps, didn’t guess, didn’t move fast because the deadline was close. When someone in a design review asks “why this typeface?”, you want to have a real answer.
Two years is a long time. It also felt exactly right.
Project Catalyst started as an internal codename for a color audit. It became the whole visual identity, announced as part of our Today’s SurveyMonkey campaign and live everywhere SurveyMonkey meets the world.
This isn’t the end of the work. It’s the moment the real test begins. Does the system hold under scale? Will the new visual language translate into every context we haven’t anticipated yet? We’ll find out together.
One thing we’re certain of: asking the right questions at the start made all the difference. How on brand.