Visual transformation of a leading data company — a bold move to reflect its 360º approach to insights.

Designing a scalable identity system for a data company that had outgrown its category.

Netquest had evolved beyond traditional market research. Its brand hadn't.

My role

Led Brand Strategy, Visual Identity & Design System, working closely with UX/UI designers Santi Sanchez, Fran Cabeza, and Arnau Clavero. Cross-functional collaboration across Marketing, Product, Engineering, and external creative partners.

1. Where Netquest was

Business Context & Business Goals

Netquest combined surveys, geolocation, behavioural signals, audio matching, and passive data into a unified view of consumer behaviour.

Internally, design had limited strategic influence. Product managers drove most design decisions, there was no unified design culture, and branding, product, and marketing operated in separate silos.

Like most companies in the category, it looked visually interchangeable: technical, abstract, built for researchers rather than decision-makers. But the audience had changed. Netquest was increasingly speaking to marketing leaders and strategic teams who needed clarity before complexity.

The gap between what the company did and how it presented itself had become a business problem. The goal was a brand that could carry the full sophistication of the product while making it legible to a wider, less technical audience.

The starting point wasn't aesthetic. It was a strategic decision to stop looking like the rest of the category, articulated as three objectives: build an identity grounded in the Symphony of Data tagline, carry that concept into the visual system, and ship a design system that made the work sustainable internally.

2. The translation problem

Problem (User + Business)

Differentiation wasn't the problem. Translation was.

User problem
Two distinct audiences, one generic experience. Agency researchers arrived looking for sample quality, fieldwork, and methodology. Marketing and research leaders arrived looking for business outcomes, strategic insights, and consumer understanding. The site spoke the first group's language. The second, increasingly the one making buying decisions, couldn't quickly understand what Netquest did or why it was different.

Business problem
The brand looked identical to every other data company in the market. The sales team needed a steady flow of qualified leads, but the website wasn't generating enough SQLs to support pipeline. The brand was failing both the buyer and the business at once.

3. Why the dancer

Approach & Rationale

Netquest's existing tagline, Symphony of Data, became the conceptual foundation for the identity system.

A symphony works through orchestration: multiple instruments operating independently while contributing to a coherent whole. Netquest operated the same way. Surveys, geolocation, behavioural signals, and audio data combined into a unified consumer perspective.

Symphony and data weren't a slogan. They were two semantic fields that had to overlap: music, movement, harmony, rhythm on one side, mathematics, precision, signal, structure on the other. The visual system grew out of that overlap.

The identity translated orchestration into visual structure: frequencies, radial systems, wave patterns, rhythm, repetition, and measurable patterns.

Not decoration. Signal.

Why the dancer. Most data companies visualise information. We chose to visualise perception.

Charts belong to the product. Repeating them in the brand weakens both.

The dancer became the central visual metaphor because motion reveals dimensionality. A spinning body exposes multiple perspectives simultaneously, a visual parallel to Netquest's promise: a complete view of human behaviour in motion.

The figure also carried the values the data itself demanded: precision, discipline, study, and exactness.

4. Building the system

Execution

Three workstreams running in parallel, converging on a single 2023 launch where the visual refresh and the new website went live together.

1 Identity
Visual language built from the Symphony of Data concept. Dancer as central metaphor. Frequencies, radial systems, rhythm, repetition. The palette gained brightness for digital environments where the brand mostly lives, and expanded in range to absorb the multiplicity of data types and products the system had to represent.

2 Design system in HubSpot
Modular component library built inside HubSpot, the CMS and CRM the marketing teams already used. Reusable page templates, email structures, landing page modules, tokenised architecture for multi-language and multi-team consumption. Built as primary infrastructure, not as a workaround.

3 Site rebuild and conversion architecture
Audience-led IA replacing methodology-first navigation. Servicios reorganised around research types. Soluciones built around buyer profiles and use cases. Pages turned from brochure copy into full marketing assets with multiple conversion moments, lead magnets, and qualifying form fields routing to sales.

The hardest part wasn't designing the system. It was making it survive implementation across internal teams and an external execution partner.

5. What changed

Outcomes / Key Insights

Netquest stopped communicating like a traditional research company and started operating like a modern behavioural intelligence platform. The brand could speak to technical researchers without alienating decision-makers unfamiliar with research complexity.

Marketing, Product, and Engineering moved from siloed workflows to a shared operational system. The Marketing Automation Lead became self-sufficient, producing emails and landing pages without a designer in the loop, while still shipping work that looked like Netquest.

The key insight: brand and product are different layers. Treating them as one is what made the whole category look generic. Keeping the brand abstract and human let it stay memorable without competing with the product, and consistency, the part nobody sees, turned out to be the real deliverable.

6. What I learned

Learnings

The most important decision on this project wasn't visual. It was separating brand expression from the product entirely, a non-obvious call in a data company where the instinct is to make everything look like data.

That decision shaped everything downstream: the dancer instead of dashboards, motion instead of charts, a brand that earned attention while the product earned trust through detail.

Strong systems aren't defined by visual ambition. They're defined by how cleanly they survive contact with the teams, tools, and timelines that have to use them.

7. Impact

Three measurable shifts after rollout, across conversion, operation, and adoption.

0.21% → 0.44%

Visit-to-form conversion HubSpot website analytics, pre-rebrand (early 2023) vs post-rebrand (mid-2023 onwards)

Driver: Website rebuilt on the Symphony of Data identity and HubSpot-native design system, with clearer hierarchy, stronger positioning, and audience-specific conversion paths.

7+ days → <1 day
Time-to-publish per landing page Measured before vs after a 6-month design system rollout

Driver: HubSpot-native design system with reusable templates and components.

7 X 2 Languages and internal teams running on the system
Marketing and Marketing Automation, across ES, DE, EN, FR, IT, PT-BR, PT-PT

Driver: Tokenised architecture built for multi-language, multi-team consumption without design intervention per asset.

New visual identity

The visual identity moved Netquest away from abstract data iconography. The radial system and dancer replace the generic analytical aesthetic the category had converged on. Distinction by subtraction.

Color palette

Rebuilt for digital, where the brand mostly lives. Brighter than before, broader in range to carry the multiplicity of data types and products the identity has to represent.

Design system

The HubSpot-native design system. Tokenised type, colour, and spacing, with reusable components and templates that let Marketing and Marketing Automation teams ship landing pages and emails without returning to design. Consistency embedded into the components themselves.

Website

The site was restructured around the audience the brand was actually speaking to: marketing leaders and strategic teams who needed clarity before complexity. New page hierarchy, navigation, and conversion paths built for buyers, not researchers.

Global rollout

Seven languages: ES, DE, EN, FR, IT, PT-BR, PT-PT. Built centrally, rolled out across every market Netquest operates in.

Out of home

The identity carries across out-of-home and editorial surfaces without collapsing into product visuals. The dancer holds at human scale. The system feels less like data and more like the people behind it.

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DESIGN-DEPT.

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Phone: +34 622 712 521
Email: fabioestellita@gmail.com
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