Tentaro: rebranding an AI tool for codebases
Client:
Scope
Tools
Tentaro is an AI tool that answers questions about a company's own codebase, on premise. It launched as CodeQA, where QA stood for Question and Answer. Almost nobody read it that way: developers saw QA and assumed a testing tool, so the name argued with the product in every conversation. The rebrand started there, as a fix for a misunderstanding rather than a refresh, and it became the first real brand the product ever had.
I ran the strategy workshops and consulted the results with the team, then designed the whole visual identity. The decisive move was shifting the axis from features to context: a team loses context when a key person leaves, and an AI assistant never had it. Context became the difference inside a category people already understand, which gave every later decision, from the name to the color proportion, something concrete to serve.
The identity is dark first and built on light. The mark reads as a tent seen from above and as the four pointed spark the AI category already uses, so it carries both a story of its own and instant recognition. The warm side stayed material rather than fire, because orange at flame intensity reads as a warning inside an interface. To stop that warmth from spreading, I wrote a composition rule that counts warm places instead of warm elements, defined precisely enough that a script can check it.
The deliverable was not a PDF. The brand ships as a published Figma library with tokens and component sets, templates for social, presentations and video, an asset pack, a self contained HTML guide that opens offline, and three AI skills that build new creatives from the real components. Marketing produces without me, and the brand it produces with is the actual one rather than an approximation of it.
