TempoNo. 022

Tempo is a startup making AI tools for sales professionals.

I was hired to build their initial brand strategy, visual identity and base design system. It ended up being a great exercise in what’s possible in branding today with new AI tooling. A brand can truly be a system that blends deterministic and non-deterministic output through integrated tooling and carefully gathered context. For me, this project represented a new way of deploying a brand as a full design system designed to be used and executed by both humans and agents.

Some highlights from the deliverables were a comprehensive token system, a series of image generation profiles, brand strategy context for agents and humans, brand voice guidelines, web components for use by agents and durable brand assets for use in-harness and in Figma.

The insight the work is based on is that sales professionals — and all white-collar professionals for that matter — feel increasingly disconnected from the craft they have built a career on. They feel like the human parts of their work are slowly getting replaced by software, automation and admin work.

Tempo is making tools to help salespeople reclaim their craft and the brand aims to communicate this.

The identity is trying to respond to the visual culture created by SaaS brands and accelerated by the adoption of AI tools for marketing and content creation. Polished, professional execution and production value used to be what people aimed for. But with the advent of AI, the Minimalism and Corporate Memphis styles of the last decade have become associated with slop.

Generative AI has made visual polish so cheap that taste and genuine voice have become extremely rare. A smiling picture is no longer proof of life. People know a pretty portrait is the easiest thing for an AI model to generate and they don’t trust it anymore.

Tempo is leaning into evidence of human craft and thinking. Doodles, photo texture, handwriting, selfies, unfiltered perspectives. Pushing back on slickness with a bit of chaos.