After 10 years, Urban Airship became Airship

Urban Airship pioneered mobile push notifications in 2009, and in the decade that followed, increased their mobile leadership and quickly grew to embrace new digital channels and devices. After 10 years, Urban Airship became Airship. It wasn’t just a name change, it was a complete rebrand to better reflect their growth and positioning.

One of the first goals of our project was to drive the rebrand of Airship visually, in support of the new name and updated positioning and messaging. 

We were also challenged in how best to showcase Airship’s updated messaging and positioning, including communicating Airship’s product capabilities, value, and differentiators.

The final piece to this project was choosing a framework best suited for Airship’s needs and building a marketing site that not only looked great but was fast, intuitive, and easy to update.

Partnership makes all the difference

We started this partnership by focusing on the branding. Flickerbox and Airship worked closely together to create a new brand for the company including logomark, logotype, typography and color palettes. We started from the ground up, enabling us to take a fresh look at the company Airship had grown into starting with understanding the product, the unique selling points, prospective users, competition, and the industry in general. We led workshops and brand exercises to figure out how best to tell the new story. 

Our content goal for the new Airship site was to consolidate and hone existing content into a tighter subset of content. Flickerbox worked with the Airship team to develop an information architecture that consolidated existing and proposed content into new content buckets and a site structure that positioned the content intuitively for visitors. 

Following the brand and positioning work, Flickerbox worked with the Airship team to design the website based on the newly formed branding guidelines. We started with wireframes and moved through static color comps for all key pages. As a part of the design process, we underwent a thorough stock photography search and exploration. The Airship team had a very clear vision for the type and tone of all site photography, so we worked closely with them to source and prep images that best suited their vision. 

Based on Airship’s unique marketing needs, Flickerbox built a custom publishing experience using WordPress modern Gutenberg editor. The final product was intuitive and easy to use for beginners, but powerful and flexible enough for the most demanding WordPress veterans.

Preserving a decade of content and SEO

Through a custom built import utility, Flickerbox was able to move Airship from their antiquated CMS platform while migrating nearly 1,400 pages of content. This process allowed us to preserve not only Airship’s content, but also their content configuration down to taxonomies, featured images, related posts, authors, and more. By automating the heavy lifting of this content migration for Airship, we freed them up to focus on building new content for their site while allowing them to continue leveraging years of content and thousands of hours of marketing efforts. 

Airship has over 1,300 pages indexed by Google resulting in over 1 million organic impressions per month. (As of April 2021)