Designing and delivering an evergreen thought leadership platform for Microsoft that will help to change the role and leadership perception of Microsoft Azure, the companies open and flexible cloud-based app computing platform.

Our team began by developing and aligning on an approach to building thought leadership platforms, starting first with setting the experience foundation that would define the overall platform experience. This foundation required us to develop a unique brand identity that would exemplify Microsoft's commitment to delivering meaningful content and solutions to their developer audience. As a part of the identity, we needed to create a brand narrative and theme that would also reflect across the curation of developer stories, challenges, and solutions.

As Brand Identity Lead and Principal on this project, it was important for me to explore how we might best capture and express Microsoft's vision for serving the next generation of developers. The first pattern we discovered was that the app innovation landscape is comprised of rapidly evolving perspectives, methodologies and very loud voices. What was clearly needed was clarity in an information saturated world. Developers need experiences and transformative content that can connect perspectives to enrich their point of view.

And so we leaned on this idea of a connected perspective. An unbroken view of the landscape. This inspired a powerful symbol that Microsoft could own and audiences could relate to — the Panorama. Panorama is the north star concept of a platform that continually propagates and expands to cover the latest on the app innovation landscape.