The arc

Eight years, one brand.

  1. 2017 · JW PlayerBack to its rootsJoined as marketing designer, promoted to Creative Director in 2018, and rebuilt the brand and everything it touched.
  2. 2022 · JWPMore than a playerThe name shortened to JWP. Same year: the Stand Out Achievements award.
  3. 2024 · JWP ConnatixThe merger brandA new identity, website, templates and videos for the combined company.
  4. 2025 · JWXHanded offI left once the new brand was fully rolled out. Today the company goes by JWX.

Part 1 · JW Player · 2017–2022

Lost signal.

JW Player helped start the online video era. Its player powered the first YouTube upload. By the time I arrived, the brand had drifted far from its own guidelines: new colors, unapproved fonts, wonky layouts, no two pieces alike.

The fix

Back to the heart of it.

I spent my first three months peeling back the layers to find what the brand actually was: the red W, one typeface and a tight palette of JWP Red, Navy, Slate and Mist. Then I rebuilt everything on top of it, from slide templates to event spaces, so the brand grew with the company instead of drifting again.

Back to the core. Rebuilt everything on what the brand already had: the red W, Karbon, and four colors, from the lobby wall to the website.
Company size, 2017 to 2024. Marketing designers the whole time: one.
150+ → 390

Part 1 · The toolkit

Built, not briefed.

The work nobody puts on a stage, and the work the company ran on every day: sales and leadership templates, one-pagers, case studies, ebooks, whitepapers, emails and banner ads.

All of it built so the brand held together even when I wasn’t the one making the piece.

Sales collateral. Designed the master templates the sales team built on.
Ebooks. Designed and laid out long-form content in the same voice.
Case studies. Designed the template that turned customer wins into sales stories.
“In Demand Gen, I often needed to move fast. Adam made that possible. He created templates and design tools that helped me scale campaigns quickly without sacrificing quality. I’d work with him again in a heartbeat.”
David Goldberg, Demand Generation Manager, JW Player
  • Fox
  • Bell Media
  • New York Post
  • Hearst
  • SNY
  • Chelsea FC
  • PBS
  • Vice
  • Fast Company
  • Insider
  • Fandom

Part 1 · The events

The room is the brand.

Insights was the company’s biggest event of the year, mainly in New York and London, with speakers and partners from Akamai, Business Insider, Adweek, Digiday, Group Nine, CafeMedia, SpotX and Float Left.

I turned blank conference centers into rooms where the brand was everywhere: digital signage, kickoff videos and print, plus details people remember, like hand-painted murals and branded coffee carts.

Guests
491
Speakers
30+
Home cities
NYC + London
A glowing red W on a white wall at an Insights receptionWatch the kickoff (opens YouTube in a new tab)
The kickoff. The film that opened the day. I made the moodboards and storyboards, then brought it to life with a copywriter and a motion designer.
An Insights audience in a red-lit London cinema, the JW Player logo on the screenWatch the recap (opens YouTube in a new tab)
The recap. Produced the Insights recap video: the stage, the room and the people in it.
Main stage. Designed the stage set: pillars, screen and riser, all one system.
The stairs. Designed a count of videos streamed, one step at a time.
The landing. The payoff at the top of the climb.

The detail

The stairs did the selling. Each step counted up the videos streamed through JW Player while you climbed, the scale of the product, felt in your legs.

The other staircase. Designed the W to wrap the stairs, one riser at a time.
Customer proof. Designed hanging signs that put client results in the walkway.
The room. Clients, prospects and industry leaders, talking about the future of video.
Between sessions. Designed the sponsor wall and screens behind the coffee line.
The marquee W. A light-up W for the lobby, built from the logo.
On stage. Designed the backdrop: the W over a wave of data.
London. The W, backlit, at the London edition.
Breakout. The W, painted big enough to frame every talk.
Badges. Designed the badges and lanyards: Insights Today. Impact Tomorrow.
Wayfinding. Designed the pull-up banners. Every stat comes with a story.
Gift bags. Designed the bags guests took home.
Merch. Designed the crewneck: the Insights dots, fading out.

Part 1 · Winning the big accounts

The mailer was the demo.

JW Player powers video for some of the biggest names in media and sport, all customers during my time there. That’s the caliber of company my ads, direct mail and landing pages were built to win.

For about 50 priority prospects, a postcard and a QR code weren’t going to cut it. The box asked one question: is weak video ad revenue keeping you up at night? Inside, a video screen played the pitch the moment it opened, next to a white-noise machine, a sleep mask and a note promising they’d sleep like a baby. No link to click, no landing page to load. Just the pitch, playing in their hands.

I helped shape the idea, then designed every piece: the box, the screen, the card, the kit and the display ads that carried the same line online.

Open and play. A video player company, sending a video player, with a good night’s sleep packed in beside it.
The kit. Designed the box, the card and every branded piece inside.
Air cover. Designed the display ads that carried the same line online.

Result. Several sales meetings from about 50 priority prospects.**Client conversion unknown.

Part 2 · JWP Connatix · 2024

A merger isn’t two logos. It’s one new story.

The system

One color, two companies.

In 2024, JWP merged with Connatix: roughly 390 people and 81 people, two brands, two websites and two customer bases, becoming one company quickly and in public.

Most companies hand a rebrand that size to an agency. We didn’t need to. I built it in-house: the identity, the brand guidelines, the templates and the launch work, on the company’s timeline and without an outside agency budget. Across both companies, I was still the only marketing designer.

The heart of it is the color. Amethyst purple blends JW Player’s legacy red with Connatix blue, so the merger lives in one swatch. Custom mesh gradients add the motion a video company should have, and keep the brand from feeling static.

People, combined
470+
Marketing designers
1
Outside agencies
0
The guidelines. Built the JWP Connatix brand identity system, in-house: color, type, gradients, icons, photography and usage, so every team could launch on brand.
Stationery. Designed the cards so the gradient carries the brand when the logo is small.
Collateral. Designed the ebooks and reports on the new system.
At full scale. Designed the merger brand as a booth: the W, the gradient and one line, The future of video, built for today.
Out of home. Designed the vertical video launch: Video is going up.
Direct mail. Designed the postcard that introduced the combined platform, front to back.

Part 2 · The website

Two sites. One home.

After the merger we were paying for two clunky websites, and marketing waited on engineering for every change. While digging into the sites, I spotted unusual bot traffic quietly driving up our hosting costs.

I simplified the site and rebuilt it as one fresh site on HubSpot, where our contacts already lived. That cut our hosting costs significantly, retired a second platform, and let marketing ship its own updates, alongside new templates and marketing videos for the combined company.

Hosting costs
Way down
Websites
2 → 1
Modular pages. Built the pages from blocks, so marketing can add one without a developer.
Homepage. The first place the new story had to land.
One site. Two companies’ products, explained in one voice.
“We finally have a website that looks like the company we’ve become. It’s faster to build, easier to update, and way more aligned with how we talk about ourselves now.”
Senior Marketing Manager, JWP Connatix

What happened

The company grew. The brand kept up.

Insights became the company’s biggest event of the year, with 491 guests and 30+ speakers. The mailer turned about 50 priority accounts into several sales meetings. And after the merger, one site on HubSpot cut hosting costs significantly and let marketing move without engineering. I left once it was all rolled out.

Why it holds together

One brand, eight years.

From marketing designer to Creative Director, through three names and a merger, every piece came back to the same story. A prospect met one brand whether they found it online, on a show floor or in a box on their desk.

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