How Together built Bytebase's identity with four Lego-inspired shapes

Bytebase is a platform that allows developers to safely access and change their databases. London-based creative agency Together took on the rebrand and the website, building on a product that had already brought every database under one governed path. The technical side had been solved. Together’s job was to do the same for the brand, stripping out the complexity the category tends to wear as a badge of seriousness. The reference that Together kept returning to was Lego. A small kit of simple parts: approachable to anyone and capable of building anything. From that concept came four foundational shapes, each mapped to a stage of the database workflow in their simplest possible forms. Access control became the square, for security, boundaries and stability. Deploy and change is the triangle, referencing movement and direction. Governance was applied to the circle, for oversight and unity, with a small nod to the avatar forms already familiar inside the product. Integration became the hexagon, the shape of connection and network, both visually and structurally. The Lego thinking gave the studio a set of traits to design against more than a reference to mimic: approachability, so anyone could pick it up, interconnectivity, so every part fit with every other; and scalability, so the system could keep growing without losing shape. “Keeping Lego as our internal inspiration forced us to design down rather than up,” explains Ben Wynn-Owen, Creative Director at Together. Bytebase’s existing wordmark and logo had to carry through, so Together’s task was to build a system around them rather than come up with something new. “The logo is simple and openly friendly, which is unusual for the category,” Wynn-Owen tells us. “We needed a visual language that could live comfortably next to something that approachable, which is part of why we landed on the four shapes.” Once the system was built to fit the logo, the relationship was inverted. The character behaves as a shape in its own right, representing the whole platform with the individual feature shapes living around it.