Brand

Oct 9, 2026

• Intercom

  An Upstanding Brand: How Team Values Influence How We Work

  Intercom’s Brand Studio defines core values to guide behavior and decision-making without micromanagement as the team scales. The values answer four fundamental questions about why the team exists, what it does, how it behaves, and how it will succeed, and are written as reflections of who the team wants to be, not platitudes. Key values include building trust through vulnerability and inclusivity, making each other better through accountability and learning from diversity, and loving kind and open-minded people who reject mediocrity and are always kind. The values also emphasize supporting the mission, seeking to understand problems and each other, balancing art and science, and encouraging experimentation with considered risks and acceptance of failure. They are woven into branding, hiring, leveling, process work, and performance reviews to define success in expected behavior, and are intended to be discussed and evolved to help the team do the best work of their careers.

• Intercom

  Behind the design work of Building Intercom - The Intercom Blog

  For the ‘Building Intercom’ event page, the design team aimed for an ‘unapologetically nerdy’ aesthetic to appeal to engineers without resorting to tired clichés. The author discovered the Hershey fonts, originally created in the 1960s by physicist A.V. Hershey, and revived them into functional font files using FontSelf and then Glyphs for weight variations. A small Python script automated placing outlines into a .glyphs file, and Paper.js enabled interactive vector animations. Testing revealed issues such as event details being overlooked, Paperscript’s JavaScript evaluators forbidden by Intercom’s security team, and poor mobile browser support for Paper.js. The project reinforced the value of taking meaningful risks in design and development, reminding the author that overcoming fear of consequences is part of the work.