Athletics' personable identity for Citrix provides the software giant with the 'space to succeed'

Since being established in 1989 by Buenos Aires-born, Texas-based entrepreneur Ed Iacobucci, Citrix has grown to deliver digital workspace solutions to more than 100 million users across 400,000 organisations. Despite their long-standing success, they entered 2019 under threat from a slew of upcoming competitors such as Dropbox, Salesforce and Slack, to name a few. In an attempt to stay ahead, they approached Brooklyn-based creative studio Athletics with a substantial challenge: “how can we drive adoption as we shift from being a tech provider to a strategic partner focused on the entire employee experience?” Over the following 18 months, Athletics set out to fundamentally transform the Citrix brand, aiming to inject an entirely new belief system into the decades-old company. Working closely with long-time strategic partner Invencion, they interviewed 50 Citrix stakeholders from across the globe and led collaborative workshops with the Citrix Executive Leadership team. As a result, they landed on the strategic premise ‘the future of work is the space to succeed’, capturing their belief that the full potential of individuals and businesses can only be realised once they’re given ample space to be more creative and innovative at work. The new visual identity, which translates their strategic premise into the realms of design, aims to feel human, approachable and genuinely reflective of the way we work today through a multi-faceted, multi-sensory approach. At its core is the new wordmark, a lowercase rounded sans that sees its right-hand tittle switched to its ‘x’ in order to subtly symbolise Citrix’s unwavering focus on the individual. “At the onset of this project,” Athletics’ Executive Creative Director Malcolm Buick explains, “the Citrix wordmark was not on the table, nor up for discussion, having been set in stone for three decades.” It wasn’t until the introduction of the new strategic premise that it became fully apparent the wordmark needed to fit seamlessly within the company’s future-focused vision, as well as perform effortlessly in digital-first environments.