Brand, web, collateral and video. One client, end to end.
Kernel builds agentic entity data for enterprise revenue teams at companies like Navan, Zip, Remote and GoCardless. It started with a handful of display ads. By mid-2025 Hive was their retained design team, and I've looked after almost everything they put out since.
- Role
- Lead designer, through Hive
- Year
- 2025–now
- Worked with
- Kernel's founders and marketing team
- Where
- Studio
- What I did
- BrandWebCollateralVideo
The brief
The first job was small: a set of display ads. They landed well, more briefs followed, and by mid-2025 it had become a retainer.
The real problem showed up quickly. Kernel was moving fast, every new asset was being designed from a blank page, and the brand underneath wasn't strong enough to hold that much output together.
- 18+
- months as their retained design team
- 200+
- assets designed and delivered
- 13
- formats, from display ads to recruitment films
The brand
Data companies tend to look the same: blue gradients, glowing nodes, an abstract network. Kernel needed to stand apart from that and still feel credible to an enterprise buyer. The line I kept coming back to was simple: not another blue-gradient AI brand.
The identity is a primary logo, a secondary lock-up and a monogram, a palette built on muted greens and warm greys, and a two-typeface system: one face to set the tone, one to carry the detail.
Primary, secondary and monogram, so there's a version that fits every space.
Made to be used
A thick guideline PDF tends to get opened once. Instead I wrote a practical brand reference and built master templates, so the next deck, post or one-pager starts from something already on brand.
The website
The site went through several iterations as Kernel's positioning sharpened. Each round got closer to saying what the product does in one line: accurate entity data, guaranteed. The logos of the companies already using it sit straight underneath, because for an enterprise buyer that's the proof that counts.
The homepage leads with the promise, then the proof.
Everything else
With the brand and the templates in place, the volume work got faster and more consistent: sales decks, whitepapers, display ads, social, product videos and recruitment videos.
Whitepapers open with one question and answer it with the numbers.
Customer quote posts, including co-branded ones with partners.
A slice of the feed. The templates mean every post looks like Kernel without starting from scratch.
Jack has been brilliant to work with. We use him for all our design work, and he delivers high-quality ideas and results, extremely fast.
Zak Benney, Growth Manager, Kernel
What I took from it
A retainer only works when the client trusts you to make calls without a brief for every detail. Kernel is the clearest example of that for me: brand, web, print and video from the same hands, so all of it looks like it came from the same company.
