Ring

Role
Brand Strategy
Creative Direction
Design

Year
2020

Credits
Ring Creative and Production Teams
Illustration: Maggie Chang
CGI: No Mad
Photography: Cara Robbins, Jeff Stockwell, Jeff Edelstein, Gregory Uller

The Why
Without the What

Ring did not just invent a product. It invented a category and changed the way people relate to their homes. But as hundreds of competitors flooded the market, consumers reduced Ring to the thing that started it all. A doorbell.

They understood the "why" but not the "what." Ring offered whole-home security across a growing ecosystem of devices, plans, and services. Most people had no idea.

Ring of Security

Inspired by the blue ring on Ring's devices, we introduced the Ring of Security. It worked as both a conceptual framework and a visual element, organizing the full scope of what Ring offered into something consumers could understand at a glance. Protection for your whole home through multiple devices. Security through protection plans so you never miss a moment. The ability to be always home, even when away, and a way to be more neighborly.

The Ring of Security became the foundational setting for the entire brand, from product pages to marketing campaigns to the logomark itself.

Brand System

Ring had never had a comprehensive set of brand guidelines. The company was in hyper growth, teams operating across global markets with no common system.

The brand system needed to work at scale, whether that would be horizontal or vertical growth across devices, services, or products. The system had to work from street to screen to shelf, maintaining a consistent and premium expression at every point in the consumer journey.

Rapid growth without a unified system had taken a toll. Even the logo had degraded across markets and applications. The approach was not to reinvent the brand but to restore it, optimize it, and build the infrastructure to protect it at scale.

We kept what worked and introduced new principles where needed, but everything laddered back to core brand values. Editorial design principles informed the layout system, creating flexible compositions where text and image play into or against each other. Illustration needed to feel hand-crafted, human, and reflect the neighborly character of the brand. Typography scaled by weight depending on usage. Color was part fun, part functional, but fully purposeful, whether that was to inform in UX, stand out on the shelf in store, or stop someone while scrolling.

Content at the Center

At its core, this was a content-first system. Ring's cameras had redefined what UGC looked like, turning everyday moments captured across Ring devices into viral content shared across social. The brand had to reflect that. Most of the time content was fun. Other times, it was slightly more serious. The system had to hold both, putting the brand, its values, and its consumers at the center.

UGC was not just social content. It was the center of Ring's organic marketing engine. Everyday moments captured across Ring devices drove viral reach and brand awareness, with more light-hearted moments occasionally appearing in paid marketing. The brand system had to ensure that wherever that content appeared, across every market globally, Ring showed up consistently and at a premium level.

One of the biggest but most subtle changes was transitioning the watermark from the Ring.com logo to the primary Ring logo across live feeds, saved videos, and shared content. A URL is a destination. The logo is the brand showing up. The shift connected every UGC moment across livestreams, social, YouTube, and marketing into a single, consistent brand expression. That same consistency extended across every touchpoint, from packaging and retail to digital and product interfaces, ensuring the brand showed up the same way everywhere, in every market globally. Better brand equity. Cleaner content. A premium feel across every surface.

Results

Highest-ever brand metrics and search interest heading into Q4 2020. Ranked #7 on Business Insider's Fastest Growing Brands list.