Cymbal
A fictitious holding company that lets Google Cloud tell product stories without naming a real customer. One parent brand, a family of industry sub-brands and a shared design system give designers, demo builders and sellers realistic branding for every demo, deck and story.
Every Google Cloud demo needed a believable company that was not a real customer.
Google Cloud tells its product story through demos. Teams across industries each needed a company to put on screen: a bank, a hospital, a retailer. Using real customer brands was not an option. Every demo, deck and story needed consistent, realistic branding that did not point at a real customer, whether it was a product demo or a sales deck. The challenge was to give the people telling Google Cloud's stories one shared, believable brand universe. A design system and framework that could carry any Google Cloud product or solution story, in any industry, and still look like it came from the same place. Brand identity and art direction, built as infrastructure for other people's work.
A fictitious holding company and a design system with a sub-brand for every industry.
Karim designed Cymbal as a brand identity built for other people to use. At the top sits the Cymbal wordmark and monogram, with a construction grid, a geometric blue shape language, and a typography pairing of Avant Garde for display and DM Sans for body. Beneath it lives a family of sub-brands: Cymbal Bank, Cymbal Health, Cymbal Retail, Cymbal Shops, Cymbal Manufacturing and more. Each has its own mark, plus an industry color style and gradient for healthcare, retail, financial services, manufacturing, public sector and media. Logo usage rules, layout examples, a photography and avatar library of diverse people, and a flat illustration library round out the design system. The framework meant a designer, demo builder or seller could pick an industry and start with everything in place.
One brand universe that every Google Cloud demo could borrow and build on.
Cymbal gave Google Cloud a shared cast of companies to put on screen. Anyone building a demo could tell a healthcare story, a banking story or a retail story under one consistent, realistic brand that never pointed at a real customer. Inside the Cloud Solutions Studio, a demo storyboard was set in Cymbal Shops, so the design system became the backdrop for solution demos. Every Google Cloud demo, deck and story across industries could use the same believable, non-customer branding. It is the kind of systems thinking we still use at Open Session, where a brand is built as a kit for the people who have to use it, not a single logo.
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