If your goal as a brand is to redesign the future of work, then it stands to reason that your design foundations must be equally committed to that future.

That is the ethos at the heart of the new visual identity for the freelance talent platform, Upwork. The brand appointed branding and design agency NOT Wieden+Kennedy after a competitive pitch process. The goal was to create a new design system and visual identity to drive both global brand awareness and differentiation through product experience.

The result is ‘A new dimension of work’, a design system and visual identity, which spans everything - from social posts to the design infrastructure of the platform itself.

The system is designed to underpin the brand's vision of ‘a world where work works for everyone’. A product offering designed to offer companies agility through access to top talent and ideas globally, and flexibility for creative talent with the promise of work which fits into people’s lives, rather than the other way around. 

According to NOT Wieden+Kennedy the new visual identity is sleek, minimalist and designed to convey a constant sense of forward momentum and growth. 

The new design includes a new typographic system with dimensional treatments, created with a purpose-built fluid grid system that allows endless permutations of shape and image. These have been designed to communicate the flexibility at the heart of the future of work.

Over the course of 18 months, the Upwork team worked closely with the agency conducting interviews with employees and customers, and reviewing hundreds of brand touchpoints. The new identity will appear across every customer and company experience, bringing a unified look and feel to every interaction.

Bryan Harvey, Group Creative Director, Upwork, explains: "When creating this design system we wanted to create something that spoke to the vision of Upwork. That meant creating a suite of design tools and principles that could express the essence of our brand in a multitude of beautiful ways, while also driving consistency across every place you experience it.”

Adam Rix, Head of NOT W+K comments: “Not content with just a better world of work today, Upwork is building a better future of work every day – a world of work that is fluid and adapting to people’s needs.”

The redesign underlines that the future of work is less about the impossiblility of achieving work/life balance and more about designing a future where life comes ahead of work. In both design and life balance is a pointless pursuit.