HeyGen 2025 Global Rebrand
In late 2024 I joined HeyGen, a cool new AI video generation platform. The tech they enabled was so impressive, I immediately saw enterprise potential and set out to create an AI brand like no other. This was an AI platform for the rest of us, a tool so easy to use and yet so infinitely powerful, allowing anyone to create broadcast quality video stories in minutes, no camera or fancy film crew necessary.
The company had no real brand identity at the time, nor a common way to message customers and express its value. Given an expansive competitive map in AI, HeyGen needed to stand out with a bold, unique and expressive identity that both explained its offering and made the technology look fun and infinitely doable. I was all over this one.
Once again, my process is to hire the most talented agency team we can afford, guide them through strategies and visual exploration, then bring the entire process in-house, where my team can scale the raw creative into a comprehensive visual system, complete with brand style guidelines and templates. This always saves the company money and results in a world class brand system.
So first off, I have to acknowledge a small community of contributors to this work, including the talented team at Pentagram London, as well as the mighty internal HeyGen creative team. Driving this effort and working with such amazing talent was a dream.
Our initial instructions to Pentagram London were to explore the concept of video messaging in one place: everything you need to script, explore, generate and edit a broadcast quality video, right from one platform. Early sketches meandered from holographs and windows of imagery, to claymation. At one point we were shown a glass ball that had images in it. I almost fell out of my seat. That’s it! That’s the big idea, the seed idea for the entire visual system. After many iterations, we perfected a magical glass orb containing imagery showing different people, different slices of their lives, telling stories about their businesses, their dreams, their personal crusade. It represented the platform perfectly.
Once refined, we exploded that orb into pieces, creating “colored parts” that could be used almost as a branded “paint set” for background designs.
Website was fun, playful and invited people in to try “the AI for the rest of us”.
Of course, no brand would be much fun without an ever helpful mascot. Ours is named Orby and he plays roles in both marketing and product.
Over the course of 2025, that rebrand and subsequent campaign work would propel HeyGen from $25M arr to $125M by 2026. I am excited to say the brand looks truly timeless and enterprise-worthy now. And good thing. The team has decided to pivot to business customers entirely.