36 creators, three days, one launch.

A welcome dinner at The Hoxton, where every creator found a merch kit waiting at their seat.

The merch kits

A kit waiting for each creator at their seat: a named box and tote holding an umbrella, tumbler, notebook, travel adapter, tea and a disposable camera to capture the trip, all in the new brand — the first physical piece of the refresh anyone outside the company had touched.

Interviews and content creation in the London office, then workshops — including a tote-making session where creators printed and pressed their own bags.

First, the city: a ride on a red Routemaster bus, then up on the London Eye.

Then back to the hotel to get ready, and on to our flagship Tottenham Court Road office.

The night ran in this order:

1. 01Button-pressing ceremony — The latest version of Goodnotes goes live on the App Store.
2. 02The new logo — The refreshed mark unveiled to the room, and to the team watching live around the world.
3. 03A speech from our COO
4. 04Food and drink — Hors d’oeuvres, branded cupcakes and custom cocktails.
5. 05Music — A DJ under the disco balls.
6. 06Karaoke — To close the night.

A colourful photo wall I designed and built for the party: the logo, collaborator tags, cursors and stickies at room scale. The vision, and how it came to life.

The vision

The reality

Real-life versions of our collaborator cursors, each printed with a creator’s name or handle, so every photo at the wall was personal and unmistakably Goodnotes.

The founder sets the tone: strong, experienced, effortlessly cool, with a past life in music and tech. The visuals follow her lead — clean, unfussy, with a touch of edge.

Confident language and simple socials let the feeling do the talking. The result is a brand that feels like her, and gives clients room to breathe.

thewardoffice Surrey, UK

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thewardoffice Meet Mrs Ward — three babies, two continents, one very organised brain. Swipe for the CV.

Confident language, simple socials — the feeling does the talking.

Seasonal wishes in the brand serif — warm, no clip art.

Bett 2026 — the Goodnotes brand built out at scale across three days at ExCeL London, the world's biggest education technology show.

Stand design, wayfinding, demo screens, printed collateral and giveaways for the January 2026 show — the whole presence designed to read from across the hall and hold up close, with a team briefed to talk to teachers all day.

Over three days the team brought the product to life for an international community of educators. The demos, the conversations, the merch, the booth — a result that landed visually and in spirit.

leads off the stand across three days — against a target of 200.

Stand out at the world’s biggest edtech show and turn passing teachers into conversations.

In-house lead for stand design, wayfinding, demo screens, collateral and giveaways.

Design the stand to read from across the hall and still hold up close.

450+ leads against a target of 200 — up 146% on the year before.

Great products are built by teams who care deeply — about the work, the users, and each other.

Long days on their feet giving demos and answering questions, plus the educators who volunteered their own time to speak on the stand through talks and Q&As — the schedule only worked because they showed up for it.

Emily Howard · Daniel Emmerson · Melissa Li · Emily Zhang · Antonija Laus · Kristina Kovalchuk

Plus the WX team, who kept everyone fed and hosted the surrounding events at the London HQ.

Over a year behind the scenes, then a new Goodnotes — a brand for millions of people who learn, create and take notes.

I led the rebrand from inside: internal research and workshops, then the stakeholder management — working closely with Steven, our CEO and founder, Minh Tran (then VP of Operations, now COO) and Phillip Lam (then VP of Engineering) to keep the leadership aligned as the work developed.

After 11 years with barely a change, Goodnotes was moving somewhere “much bigger than what we’re known for today”, and the brand hadn’t kept up. I managed the agency — Motto, out of New York — and held brand guardianship throughout.

It started in-house: a Google Ventures-style brand sprint and a tone-of-voice workshop. Then I approached nine agencies. Motto won because it was strategy-led and “happy to build upon the brand strategy we have already made progress on” — we didn’t want an agency to “bulldoze everything and start from scratch.” Thirteen months from agency selection to launch, in two stages: Motto built the brand, then the launch campaign. When the logomark needed more time than the agency schedule allowed, I split it into its own project.

Strategy workshops with Motto, autumn 2022 — the brand squad working live on the board, then reflection and next steps.

A full identity: logomark and wordmark, a named colour palette, an illustration system and a manifesto that gave the brand its voice — all documented in guidelines on Brandpad.

From the guidelines on Brandpad: the rules that let the team use the brand without me.

Journey lines — straight, curved and looped, drawn to one fixed stroke.

Sketch illustrations with type: emphasising words, clustering for impact, and letters weaving through the journey lines.

“Notes Reimagined” took the new brand public on 9 August 2023: concept, social strategy, influencer brief, press, and app and web copy.

The Goodnotes 6 launch film, made with the agency Carbon.

Out-of-home and digital concepts for the campaign. Images: Motto.

The toughest part, and the part I owned end to end: bespoke assets and scalable templates for marketing, environmental graphics across both offices, and brand education. Three workshops and a survey to see what had landed, then weekly office hours, an open door on Slack, and Notion guides and Loom walkthroughs — so the team could uphold the new standards without me in the room.

The new brand off-screen: a range that put the mark and illustration system into people’s hands — team kit, creator packs and everyday objects.

Made for
good work.

The parent brand above Goodnotes and Goodmeet, built to sit over both products without competing with either. I led it from the client side with Further, then rolled it out in-house.

Twelve months from brief to launch, five of them with the agency.

Client-side lead with Further, then in-house rollout.

A visible parent brand, with Goodnotes kept as the flagship.

A shared framework that binds the product suite, ready for every launch that follows.

“The rebrand marks an important pivot for our business, from a single product to a portfolio of products. It enables us to scale towards a much bigger ambition.”

Steven Chan Founder & CEO, Good Systems

A brand built for products that don’t exist yet. Every decision had to hold up for the next launch, not just this one.

Designed, built and launched in-house.

Launch assets from our creative studio.

A range made for the company offsite.

Brand graphics for the Paddington office.

For the senior leadership team.

Rolled out company-wide.

Taking your notes.
Guarding your privacy.

A fast add-on to the Good Systems master brand: six weeks with Further, from kickoff on 1 July to the full identity on 12 August, built to launch alongside the parent brand.

Goodmeet works like a cloud note-taker, but the processing happens on your device. The brand leans into that: a soundwave mark, a lowercase wordmark that sits with Goodnotes, and a soft white-to-orange gradient that reads as light rather than tech.

Name and brand a privacy-first AI note-taker in six weeks.

Client-side lead with Further, then in-house rollout.

Make the proof point the brand: “Sent to cloud: Nothing”.

Beta on 10 August; public launch with Good Systems on 23 September.

Goodmeet — working name Paddington, the Meeting Assistant — started outside the agency’s scope and came back in as its own workstream.

Further’s first presentation, the “Strategic Bridge”, set out the product truth, the market and the audience, and how the brand would work on its own, in the suite and under the parent brand.

The core value proposition from the brand toolkit: “Say it freely, keep it private”, built on four pillars — better ideas, judgement, alignment and outcome.

Naming, routes and priority assets ran in parallel with the master brand, with two reviews before the first delivery.

Parent and product side by side. Both marks are built from fluid, rounded forms, and both sit on soft grained gradients — Good Systems cool and lilac, Goodmeet warm and orange — so the family reads as one without the products looking the same.

Colour accessibility: every pairing checked against WCAG AA, so the palette stays usable in product and campaign.

Texture principles: 10% noise, a subtle blur for depth, and half of every composition kept in core white.

The launch video, released with Good Systems on 23 September.

Designing for evolution, not reinvention.

Refresh the brand in three months for the September pivot to AI and professionals.

Ran the refresh: redrew the logo, rebuilt the palette, led the rollout.

Evolve, don’t reinvent: keep the smile and the equity, lose the stylus-first thinking.

Shipped with Goodnotes Essential and Pro in September 2025.

It had to work in the product too. I locked it before code freeze so it could ship in September, and the product design team rebuilt the UI base palettes and tokens on the same perceived-lightness logic.

In October I followed up with colour logic for a more professional audience: secondary colours became accents, the core palette took on more of the backgrounds, and navy moved from primary to secondary.

My walkthrough of the palette refresh for the team, August 2025: the before and after, and the thinking behind each change. 13 minutes, with sound.

Roobert stays as the main font. Goodnotes Hand, a new handwritten font designed entirely from scratch by our summer intern — who we later converted to full time — replaced Bright Clones — it carries the voice in notes, stickies and callouts, so layouts read as thinking in progress.

Flow Rounded and Redacted Script stand in for text in product and illustration scenes, used only when absolutely necessary, so the focus stays on the idea rather than the words.