Culture Stack

Design evolution · 2025—26 · Founder, design, build

Twelve versions of one question: how do you draw a culture without pretending it is a score?

Problem

The first map was legible and useless. Bubbles around a leadership core, colour for distance, a ring for cohesion — pretty, and nobody could say what to do on Monday. It also implied precision the data did not have.

Culture Map v1 — teams as bubbles around leadership

Idea

Stop drawing a snapshot; draw movement. Fix the anchor, play the years, let the team average walk and leave a trail. Culture stopped being a diagnosis and became a history you could argue with.

Trajectory — one fixed anchor, the team walks and leaves a trail

Execution

The landing page had to survive a stranger with eight seconds. No score, no chart-as-hero: one sample read, three named dimensions, and the friction stated in words. The product is the sentence, not the graph.

CultureClaim landing v3 — the sample read carries the pitch

Evolution strip — 2025—26

v2 · Jahresringe — hiring years as tree rings

v3 · Skill tree — people as nodes, too literal

v4 · Scale, not zoom — sizes hold, territory rescales

v7 · Die Wirbelsäule — glance, lean-in, deep

Logo v1 — spectrum bar as the ten dimensions

Logo v3 — compass rose

Logo v4 — echolot, the sweep that finds

Wordmark at five sizes

Brand family — Culture bold, product italic

Cut

The overall culture scoreBubble sizes that implied headcountGreen as a UI colour (it belongs to the map)Taxonomy chips on every card

Kept

Ten named dimensions, always in wordsThe fixed anchor — movement must be realTwo or three friction points, never a rankingMono for metadata, serif for judgement

What the comparison said

Side by side, v1 read as astrology and v5 read as evidence. The change was not visual polish: it was removing the number and making the reader do the interpretation. Pilot users stopped asking what the score meant and started arguing about the trail, which was the point.

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