Databricks Content System
Databricks publishes constantly, and at volume. Their identity was already set, so the work was never about the brand itself, it was about producing inside it at that rate. It started with a single ebook and a request for someone who knew InDesign properly, and grew 4.5x over two years into publications, campaign work, and the technical diagrams that explain the platform.
Client:
Databricks
Year:
2024-2026
Company:
Superside
Role:
Lead Creative
CD:
Pedro Boreli
The diagrams ran past a hundred and twenty over two years, covering architectures, data flows, governance models and product ecosystems. Most started as engineers' sketches or as existing diagrams that needed rebuilding. There was no fixed convention at the start, so the approach was worked out across the volume until it held as a system.
The largest publication was the third edition of the Big Book of Data Engineering, over a hundred and fifty pages. For the first year almost all of the account came through me, and past that point the volume needed more hands. The standards went into the files, from paragraph and character styles to master pages and worked examples in InDesign, with Figma templates built so the work was replacing content rather than rebuilding it. A workshop covered the reasoning with the new designers who joined.
The account closed at 97% satisfaction, running on the templates and standards it had been handed.
