From dated to distinguished: a digital redesign for a leading load balancing company
HAProxy is a leading open-source software load balancer and reverse proxy renowned for its speed, reliability, and efficiency. They wanted to refresh their brand and website to reaffirm their position as a key industry player, just in time for a major international conference that was fast approaching.
As a lead designer at Phase2, I helped them show up as a sophisticated, future-thinking leader in the load balancing space.
The Team
The core team consisted of myself, a UX strategist, and a brand and content strategist. With a tight timeline to deliver a reimagined brand strategy, user experience, and a completely new visual direction, we adopted an agile and highly collaborative approach.
Brand persona development progressed alongside visual direction. User experience audits and testing ran concurrently with brand voice and tone refinements. This required deep alignment across our workflows, quick pivots, frequent iterations, and constant communication to ensure our final deliverables were perfectly aligned.
This style of working is no outlier — it’s the kind of dynamic collaboration necessary to deliver impact in real life scenarios.
Translating brand persona into visuals and UI
The brand persona ultimately finalized was Atlas Sentinel, a futuristic, visionary leader akin to Morpheus, who embodies wisdom and protection, innovation and stability. This was my north star in sourcing inspiration for how to reintroduce HAProxy in the digital space.
I like to approach setting visual direction for a digital experience with some flexibility. I present a few key themes — like motion, dark theme, image concept, and bento grids — and leave room for exploration while designing components, compositions, and style guides, complete with comprehensive annotations and Figma variables for efficient development.
</> Ready for development
My team transformed a dated and fragmented experience into a bold, cohesive brand presence.
This is a rare case where development efforts were handled in house at HAProxy, so I had the opportunity to collaborate with a completely new set of developers than I typically do on full design/development engagements at Phase2.
Once again, this meant frequent collaboration and coordination, learning their preferences for annotation and how best to communicate ideas, and ultimately we developed a solid working relationship that has set them up for a fast build and launch in time for HAProxyConf 2025.
