An Alien Bloom for Intercom’s AI Summit
Intercom’s Creative Studio (ICS) treats the company’s brand less like a fixed system and more like an expanding universe. That universe now includes the visual identity for Pioneer, Intercom’s second annual summit on customer service and AI, held in New York on October 9. The team built the entire campaign—from the website and digital assets to stage design and merch—inside Figma, which Head of Global Creative Studio Scott Smith describes as the “nucleus” for the 30-person team spread across multiple countries.
The brief was to create a brand that felt distinct from last year’s “periscope” concept and reflected the current state of AI tooling. The team started with broad mood boards in Figma Design, pulling in motion clips, images, and vectors to map out wide creative territories. This early exploration let brand designers, motion designers, and copywriters riff on shared boards, editing images for palette, collaging ideas, or dropping a logo sketch over a video reference to test how it worked in motion.
That process led to the concept of an “AI superbloom.” Building on the previous year’s theme of planting seeds, ICS developed a flower motif rendered in a stippled, dot-matrix style meant to evoke pollen. The team used long art boards with introductory frames when presenting to stakeholders, allowing collaborators to scroll through concepts and comment directly on frames rather than click through slides. As feedback rounds progressed, the boards grew into higher-fidelity case studies.
Refining the Pollen Aesthetic
The pollination idea clicked with a series of 3D flower renders. The team wanted something otherworldly. “We were excited by these flowers blooming in an alien way, using scale or speed to make them feel otherworldly,” says Associate Creative Director Daniel Surgeon, noting the parallel to current AI developments. To keep the look distinct, ICS leaned into particles over hyperrealism, using pollen density to shape both the logo treatment and static imagery.
To nail the motion language, ICS collaborated with the studio Colors and the Kids, experimenting with different flower types and animation styles. They tuned the density of the pollen so it could read as exciting and kinetic on screen while still working as restrained print pieces. For feedback on those animated iterations, the team used Figma Draw to mark up video frames directly, noting how a pedal’s shape or a motion path needed to shift without moving to another program.
Prototyping the Web Experience
Keeping design, prototyping, and QA in one place was a major asset for the Pioneer website, says Staff Brand Designer Claire Whitman. A key early web concept was one long poster punctuated by sticky or floating elements. Prototypes were used to show developers exactly how that would feel, working out the timing of scroll interactions and hover states before production began.
The 2024 Pioneer brand is vibrant, so the site cycles through a vivid palette on refresh, mixing earth tones with brighter, unnatural electric shades. Staff Brand Designer Justin Truong set up components to make the color-changing background dynamic. He also built an interactive footer with a pollen-style Pioneer logo whose particles scatter on hover. That interaction was recorded and baked into the Figma prototype for stakeholders.
Production and a Shared Workspace
When the project moved into production, auto layout became an essential tool for maintaining consistent spacing and padding, allowing the team to iterate quickly. They applied it not just for web but also for deliverables like digital ad placements. For marketing partners, ICS used Figma Buzz to create templated assets that keep the brand consistent while still letting collaborators experiment within a template file.
Using one platform from concept through delivery avoids the risk of going off-brand when files get handed off, says Smith. For ICS, drawing, animating, and building in a single shared space streamlines the work and keeps the visual system coherent. That’s how they turned a conceptful idea like a superbloom into a cohesive, wide-ranging event identity.
