Finding the horizon

Our design was approaching seven years old. That’s like 114 in web years. We were in desperate need of a redesign, and everyone knew it.

We actually pushed out a first version of the style guide last year that was specifically for desktop. I was surprised at how quickly it spread internally. We weren’t even close to completing it, but the need was so large that even an inkling of a design system was enough to make a significant impact.

The problem was that the first style guide was built around a concept, not a final product. The concept was off the mark — it was minimal and clean and all that, but it just wasn’t us.

How could we break years of patterns that our customers were now obsessed with, but were also holding us back from evolving?

The answer for us was to start with mobile. The constraints that the phone provided just made solving those problems so much easier. I remember breathing a deep sigh of relief.

We could do this.

Landing on a Design

So we decided to start small by re-imagining what Salesforce would look like as a mobile app.

We developed mood boards, personality concepts, and brand filters. We sat in dark rooms and asked ourselves deep, existentialist questions like, “Is a button really a button?”

We ended up with a handful of key templates and a fairly neutral aesthetic.

A few of the core Salesforce1 templates.

In light of the simplicity of the interface, we developed an icon system to imbue some personality into the visual design. The icons are colorful, slightly whimsical, and are also customizable.

Customers can pick a metaphor and a color and the icon is programmatically generated, giving them control over branding the different sections of their Salesforce application.