Arundo: Simple Design for Complex Situations

Today marks a new look for Arundo, as we launched a refreshed website. This relaunch also starts an overall brand transition across our products and collaterals. Here we’ve enumerated the reasons behind these decisions and how this brand evolution fits into our design thinking approach to industrial software.

Sometimes change for the sake of change is a good idea, but for industrial systems this is rarely true. In the industries in which Arundo operates, changing an existing system is hard, because a lot of thinking and investment goes into system design and construction before it is operated, and these systems are built to last. This is true for software just as much as for physical systems.

WHY WE MADE A CHANGE

Nevertheless, we’ve decided it was time for us to change our look and feel. We did this for a few reasons:

• We are a different company today than when we first started in 2015. This is true both in terms of our scale and maturity, as well as our understanding of the evolving IIoT landscape and how we play in it.
• We want to reflect our customers and users. Whether in the field or in the office, the people who use Arundo’s products are engineers and industrial operators. We want to make sure our products, brand, and overall design system starts with this in mind.
• We want to reflect our goals, ambitions, and personality. We have a unique heritage, with founding locations in Oslo, Palo Alto, and Houston. We have a unique focus on heavy industrial systems. And we work in a unique space, the rapidly growing and evolving IIoT and machine learning analytics sector.

ELEMENTS OF THE NEW DESIGN

Our new design features two core elements:

• It focuses on humans rather than machines. Historically our imagery focused on the types of big heavy assets and equipment on which we typically work – and on which we love to work. For the latest iteration, we are choosing to refocus our visual lens on the people who operate these complex physical systems. This is a reminder – to our team as much as to our customers – that Arundo is in the business of building products for people, rather than simply writing code for data. We want to make workers and their machines more efficient, safer and more effective, for the good of humanity.
• We chose a novel visual palette. The safest, most inoffensive brand color choice is some mixture of blue and white, just as we have used since the founding of our company. No one hates it – but by the same token it didn’t adequately represent who we are. Our new look features oranges, grays, and blacks, along with a rugged font, in a way that balances a tech-forward appeal with the toughness and complexity of the industries in which we work.

We did this for a reason. We want to reflect core themes we seek to bring out in everything we do – durability, grit, and toughness married with sophistication, technology, and elegant design. Or, as we discussed during the design process, we wanted our look to reflect the unique space where “Texas meets Scandinavia” – which is authentically who and what we are.

IMPLICATIONS FOR INDUSTRIAL SOFTWARE

What does all of this have to do with industrial software? At some level, this type of thinking underpins everything that we want to do. We want our products to stand for something we think is important: simple designs for complex situations. Our new site strives to be clean, yet convey sophisticated ideas and concepts. Similarly, our products deal with complex physical systems, yet should be easy to use and understand.

This is the ultimate goal of design in our context. We don’t assume that beautiful design is outside the purview of heavy industries. In fact, we think that end-users in these industries value elegance, simplicity, and intuitive interfaces even more than the general public, as such experiences can remove the mental fatigue associated with typical interfaces in these sectors.

One of our core values is that Arundo is here for our customers and because of our customers. Thinking about our work from their point of view should always be the foundation of what we do. With that in mind, we are pleased to show you our new website. Please let us know what you think!