Mural, the leading collaborative intelligence company, unveiled a provocative new brand identity, a bold new user interface (UI) for its digital whiteboard product, and a new collaboration skills development offering — the first of its kind in the market. Laying the groundwork for future product enhancements in 2023, these launches advance Mural’s mission to support how teams collaborate from anywhere in order to do their best work together.
According to Microsoft’s most recent Work Trend Index Special Report, 85 percent of leaders at hybrid companies lack confidence in the productivity of their employees while roughly 3 out of 4 hybrid employees say they “need a better reason to [go into the office] than company expectations.” These conflicting stances are byproducts of the persistent debate regarding where work happens.
With the announcement of the brand promise — “Intentional practices. Extraordinary work.” — Mural seeks to reconcile leaders to employees by changing how people collaborate so that remarkable work happens by design and not by accident. Mural is the only company with a systematic approach for improving teamwork that combines specialized collaboration training with powerful collaboration spaces made to inspire teams to connect and innovate from anywhere.
“For more than a decade, tens of thousands of teams at global enterprise companies like IBM, Microsoft, and SAP have taught us that skillfully applying purpose and intention to how people collaborate leads to extraordinary, innovative work,” said Mariano Battan, co-founder and CEO of Mural. “Every team can do extraordinary work. They just need to know how.”
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New brand identity elevates “intentional practices”
The new Mural brand is vibrant and welcoming, positioning teamwork as being most effective when leaders take care to plan and anticipate, first inviting and then guiding participation.
Through new typography, colors, and illustrations, the Mural brand entices engagement, prompting teams to strike a balance between structure and play as they advance ideas to impact. This balance and direction is symbolically represented by Mural’s new wordmark.
“When teams are connected to each other and to a common purpose, that’s when their best work happens,” said Kit Unger, Mural’s senior vice president of design. “It all comes together with our new brand, which reflects our core values in a distinctive, recognizable way. Our new system of expression is the foundation for our marketing, branding, and communications.”
Elements of Mural’s brand evolution include:
- A transformed identity: As a prominent representation of the company, people, and brand, the Mural wordmark is rooted in the concept of “structure and play.” Built on a foundation of black bars, the wordmark gives plenty of room for imagination, exploration, and motion.
- New color palette: Ideas are colorful and diverse, and so is the Mural brand. The core colors are deliberately optimistic and energetic while still warm and welcoming. The new palette also reflects several changes to hue, saturation, and brightness to increase color contrast for a more accessible set of default colors.
Mural partnered with the transformation and design consultancy, COLLINS, who have done celebrated work with next-generation brands like Spotify, Dropbox, and Twitch.
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New product user interface
Mural invites teams worldwide to change how they work together through collaboration spaces that are playful and simple to use and can be used regardless of where or when work happens.
The new product user interface includes improved visual thinking tools and features. Highlights of the new interface include:
- New user interface and dashboard refresh: The new UI is modern looking, fresh, and playful with rounded corners, new icons, colors, animated moments, drop shadows, top left text alignment on sticky notes, and more. This makes working in Mural easier and faster through a series of enhancements to core functionality, navigation, and search. Facilitation Superpowers® features, including timer, voting, private mode, and laser pointer, are clearly and prominently grouped. Core product capabilities are more discoverable and easily understood for all experience levels, resulting in a more vibrant, engaging experience.
- Accessibility enhancements: Text, icons, form components, and other interface elements have gone to darker grays or black-on-white backgrounds, which is more inclusive to a larger audience. Combined with more whitespace and larger default sizes, this hierarchy ensures Mural’s interface is clearly legible and meets WCAG AA color contrast requirements. In fact, Mural’s accessibility team worked in partnership with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to improve keyboard and screen reader support within the canvas for the visually impaired.
New collaboration skills development offering
In March, Mural acquired LUMA Institute, the recognized global leader in equipping people to be collaborative problem solvers through its acclaimed learning experiences and certification programs. Building on years of partnership between the two companies, the combination of Mural and LUMA now means that it’s easier than ever for global enterprises to enable employees to creatively innovate and solve problems together.
Mural has now launched its LUMA Elevate offering, exclusively available for Mural members. The new package is a combination of customizable in-person and on-demand learning experiences focused on improving teamwork, collaboration, and problem-solving — the skills fundamental to succeeding in the modern hybrid work environment. Mural members can design the curriculum and learning paths to meet their unique needs and goals.
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