Hexagon – Redefining a global technology brand
Hexagon’s measurement systems help build the world – the tunnels of London’s Elizabeth line, every F1 car on the grid, the phone in your pocket. Yet only 8% of decision-makers in its own industries could name it unprompted. High trust, near-zero visibility. Not a quality problem, but a visibility problem.
After more than two decades of acquisitions, Hexagon had grown into one of the world’s most complex industrial technology portfolios – more than 200 acquisitions forming a global ecosystem of 45 active sub-brands, operations spanning over 50 countries, dozens of industries, and 17,000 employees.
The business had evolved rapidly, but the brand had not kept pace.
In late 2024, Hexagon announced the divestment of its Octave division. The move sharpened the company’s strategic focus and created a defining moment to clarify how the business should be understood and expressed.
The need for change had surfaced earlier. A website audit in late 2023 first identified weaknesses in Hexagon’s narrative and positioning. A broader brand review soon confirmed the underlying challenge: while Hexagon’s technology powered critical industries around the world, the brand lacked the clarity and coherence needed to reflect the scale and impact of the business.
The Octave spin-off ultimately crystallised the opportunity. It provided the organisational momentum to simplify the brand, align the company’s narrative with its strategic focus, and build a modern, scalable system designed to bring clarity and consistency to every expression of Hexagon worldwide.
At the centre of the transformation was a single idea: measurement – the discipline that underpins how industries understand, model, and improve the physical world.
This was the first time in Hexagon’s history that the company had undertaken a comprehensive global rebrand.
The challenge was both creative and operational.
Internally, the task was to restore strength and consistency to the Hexagon master brand across a highly distributed organisation. Over time, uneven application across markets, teams, and touchpoints had diluted the brand’s impact.
The root cause was scale without structure. More than 200 acquisitions over 25 years had each arrived with its own brand, language and story. The result had been 47 different logos, five taglines in 14 years, 30+ languages and 900+ confusing product names: extraordinary technology wrapped in a brand architecture that behaved like a Rubik’s Cube. You cannot scale ambiguity – it only multiplies confusion.
The visual identity itself had become complex and dated – dominated by dark palettes, rigid geometric treatments, and abstract “tech glow” overlays that rarely showed real people, real technology, or real data outputs.
While Hexagon’s solutions helped industries measure and understand the world with extraordinary precision, the brand lacked the clarity and humanity needed to communicate that impact. At the same time, the company’s decentralised structure meant that any new system would need to scale across dozens of divisions, industries, and markets without slowing teams down.
A small central brand team was tasked with leading the transformation – ensuring every expression of the brand, from hexagon.com to global trade show environments to employee communications, could operate within a single coherent system.
The timeline intensified the challenge: the new brand needed to launch globally within 18 months at Hexagon LIVE 2025, the company’s flagship customer event.
Beyond visual modernisation, the programme aimed to simplify brand architecture shaped by more than 200 acquisitions, introduce a scalable design system capable of supporting global growth, and establish governance that would sustain consistent brand expression within Hexagon’s highly decentralised operating model.
We refused to run on gut feel. Before rebuilding anything, we ran six research tracks examining how Hexagon was perceived internally and externally. That evidence base pointed to one opportunity: clarity – one honest, defensible, repeatable answer to “what does this company actually do?”
Then, at the end of 2024, three forces converged: a CEO change, a spin-off announcement, and our Hexagon LIVE customer conference locked in for June 2025 in Las Vegas. An immovable, public deadline. Two CEO transitions in twelve months could have read as instability, but instead, with the whole organisation asking “who are we?” at once, we treated it as the moment to answer.
We mapped everything Hexagon does, and it all traced back to one idea: measurement – think of us as the world’s most sophisticated measuring tape. From that we built the brand promise: When it has to be right. It has to be Hexagon. More than a tagline, it is a statement of trust for industries where failure is not an option.
We rebuilt the corporate communications function – PR, internal comms, social, analyst relations, thought leadership – and wrote a single narrative: a manifesto that holds up under scrutiny from media, investors and employees.
We took an evolution-over-revolution approach to the identity, moving the logo two deliberate steps to modernise while protecting equity, and shifting imagery from abstract “tech glow” to real people, real technology and real data.
A brand strategy without a delivery system is just a brochure.
We built 800+ templates and a central Brand Hub as the single source of truth for 17,000 employees, agencies and partners, and made two brand trainings mandatory worldwide.
Everything had to arrive together at Hexagon LIVE 2025: a brand relaunch, spin-off name, new website, and the AEON humanoid robot debut, representing 18 months of work in front of ~3,000 attendees in the room and 35,000 watching live.
We governed it all with a four-tier framework: guidance, approval, workflow, exception.
The creative strategy centred on expressing the idea of measurement through a brand system designed for clarity, precision, and scalability.
Rather than a radical redesign, we pursued evolution over revolution.
The Hexagon logo moved two deliberate steps away from the original – simplifying complexity while preserving brand equity. The updated identity reflects the precision, confidence, and clarity associated with measurement technologies.
From this foundation, we developed an atomic design system built to scale across every brand touchpoint.
Starting with core elements – typography, colour, grid, and spatial logic – the system extends through modular components, templates, and full digital and physical experiences.
The visual language moved away from abstract technical imagery toward authentic representations of people, technology, and real-world data outputs, bringing greater humanity and clarity to how Hexagon’s technology is experienced.
The design system was implemented first on hexagon.com, establishing the foundation for a unified digital experience.
To enable global adoption, we created brand.hexagon.com, a central brand hub serving as the single source of truth for the organisation.
The hub provides more than 800 templates, 230 guidelines, and a growing asset library, allowing teams across Hexagon to create consistent, high-quality communications without reliance on central design resources.
We partnered with Adobe Express to empower non-designers with self-service brand creation tools, dramatically expanding the organisation’s ability to produce on-brand content at scale.
The brand system was also extended into physical experiences. Through collaboration with the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), two student cohorts developed a signature illustration system designed to be AI-generation ready and a modular “booth-in-a-box” framework that enables consistent event experiences across global trade shows.
The new brand launched globally at Hexagon LIVE 2025, our annual customer event, in front of ~3,000 attendees in the room and 35,000 watching live.
Because we had done the clarity work first, AI multiplied impact rather than confusion. Every AI tool worked from our brand guidelines, examples and templates so every stakeholder worked from the same “brand brain”.
We named the three risks openly as governance, authentic voice, and “AI slop”, and resolved them with one principle: human brand knowledge directs the tool, never the other way round.
The proof of concept was hexagon.com. A Frankenstein site with code copied from 37 separate websites, 25,000 pages in five-plus languages, of which only 25% were performing and 75% had fewer than 100 views in a year.
We audited 8,000+ pages and migrated a focused 5,200 over 18 months, AI-assisted throughout. Product pages, which composed 14% of content but 58% of traffic, were the priority: we built our own Content Manager agent in Copilot to consolidate 2,000 complex pages into 197, saving 75% of production time, with human product experts reviewing every page before it went live.
Automate the low-empathy work aggressively and protect the high-empathy work – insight, voice, relationships, the stage – fiercely.
To sustain consistency, we introduced a four-tier governance framework spanning guidance-based, approval-based, workflow-based, and exception-based models. This approach allows divisions to operate with speed and autonomy while maintaining brand integrity.
Adoption quickly exceeded expectations. Engagement with the central brand and creative team increased significantly, with inbound requests growing enough to prompt a transition from a shared mailbox intake model to a formal ticketing system.
The scalability of the system became clear when extending the identity to Leica Geosystems, one of Hexagon’s most prominent strategic co-brands.
By adapting the design system through a distinct colourway, the co-brand refresh was completed in roughly one-third of the time and at 3% of the cost of the master brand transformation.
Within months of launch, the new brand demonstrated measurable impact across perception, earned media, digital performance, and internal adoption.
The Hexagon rebrand transformed a complex global technology portfolio into a unified, scalable brand system built for clarity and growth.
By aligning narrative, design, and governance around the core idea of measurement, the programme created a brand capable of expressing the precision, confidence, and impact of Hexagon’s technologies across every market and industry it serves.
When it has to be right.
It has to be Hexagon.
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