Mozilla’s December 2024 brand announcement addresses a familiar challenge: people knew its best-known product, Firefox, without necessarily understanding the wider organization.1
Mozilla worked with Jones Knowles Ritchie on the refreshed identity. The work belongs to those teams. The lesson I take from it is relevant at a much smaller scale: a brand refresh should help the audience understand what the business actually does now.
That is a useful place to begin a website review. A new visual identity can attract attention, but the rest of the website has to carry the expanded story.
A company’s old website can be a bit like a school photograph on a professional profile. Recognizable, certainly. An accurate account of your current capabilities, perhaps less so.
Inspect the promises before choosing the new colors
Let’s apply that idea to a fictional studio that began with brochure websites and now also builds customer portals and integrations. Its homepage still shows almost entirely visual website work.
The studio hasn’t necessarily made a strategic mistake. Its website may simply have stayed still while the business moved. The refresh needs to close that gap.
Which service gets the first clear explanation?
The headline, opening copy and first examples set expectations. If all three describe attractive websites, visitors have little reason to infer that the business also develops operational systems.
Adding “and more” at the end is unlikely to do enough. It asks the reader to imagine services the company hasn’t explained. Most prospective clients already have a job.
The improved version could introduce the broader offer in plain terms, then give different audiences recognizable routes. A visitor looking for a website and one looking for a connected customer portal should both be able to find their next step.
See the brand and website we built for Tracy Nagle Immigration Law, from a standing start.
Does the evidence match the new promise?
An expanded message needs appropriate supporting work. That might include an approved example, an explanation of the process or a clear account of the problems the service can address.
A gallery of polished homepage screenshots may be excellent evidence of visual design. It cannot, by itself, explain how a business system handles approvals or connects information between tools.
The answer isn’t to manufacture a case study. Use evidence the business can substantiate, and distinguish a capability explanation from a claim about delivered results. Honest specificity is more persuasive than a mysterious “enterprise solutions” page wearing a very expensive stock photograph.
Pairs well with PayPal’s refresh has a lesson for the least glamorous page on your website.
Can the navigation carry both old and new work?
Service labels need to tell visitors where the expanded offer lives. If portal development is buried under “Creative,” the structure may still reflect the studio’s old mental model.
That doesn’t mean every service deserves equal space. The balance should reflect the current business direction and what different customers need to understand.
A shared visual system can keep the pages recognizable while allowing the content to vary. Brad Frost’s design-system thinking is useful here: reusable parts need to support an ecosystem of real uses, rather than forcing every service into the same card with a different icon.2
Before approving the refresh, compare:
- What the business wants to be known for.
- What a new visitor can describe after reading the homepage.
- What the service pages explain and substantiate.
- Where the navigation sends someone with a specific need.
The gaps between those answers are more useful than a general vote on whether the new logo feels modern.
For our sample studio, success would mean a prospective client recognizes that its integration problem belongs in the conversation. The visitor doesn’t have to memorize the entire service list; they need enough understanding to continue confidently.
A refresh can still be playful and visually distinctive. It just needs the message, evidence and structure to arrive wearing the same updated name badge.