When I first started working for SSD Nodes, Matt, the founder and CEO, made an offhand comment that’s resonated with me. I’m paraphrasing, but here’s the gist:

We’re a small company, so we can take risks and make significant changes, and we won’t get called out for it.

Unlike, for example, Dropbox, which was universally panned with the dreaded “hipster” label when they released their bold new design language. No tech blog is going to write an article based on the changes we make. If users even notice, they’ll likely move on and get back to building things without making a fuss.

Matt’s point was that we could make meaningful changes to how we present our company and our products while staying in stealth mode. Aside from a few celebratory tweets, that’s how we approached overhauling our brand throughout 2017: quietly and without fear.

Here’s the thing, though: We’re not such a small company anymore. 2017 was a very good year for us.

Does that mean we’re going to abandon the strategies that got us this far? Nonsense. But we are going to approach them with a little bit more order.

Be unafraid to push what we don’t love

Aiming for perfection is a surefire way to get absolutely nothing done.

Since September 2017, we’ve made hundreds of commits to change every single one of our pages, both with small tweaks and massive redesigns. I’ve hated most of it.

The process began with a complete redesign (and restructuring of the underlying code) in September that was meant to modernize our brand and create a bright, welcoming environment. I picked some bright colors and organic shapes, filed a pull request, and Matt gave it a thumbs-up in the form of merging my new code into master.