Silver Transform award for our work with Crosstide

We’re proud to share that Ascend Studio has won a Silver Award at the Transform Awards Europe 2026 for our work with Crosstide. The award recognised the project in the category Best Brand Development Project to Reflect a Change of Mission, Values or Positioning, celebrating a transformation that went far beyond a visual refresh.

For us, this was a defining example of branding for technology brands done properly.

Crosstide is a business with deep expertise in software, data and AI transformation, serving sectors including financial services, healthcare and retail. As the company evolved, its former name and identity no longer reflected its ambition, leadership direction or the level of trust it needed to build with senior enterprise audiences.

This is where strong technology brand strategy becomes critical. The challenge was not simply to rename the business, but to create a brand position that matched its capability, clarified its offer and gave the team a stronger platform for growth. Ascend Studio worked closely with Crosstide to develop a new name, narrative, identity and digital presence rooted in clarity, credibility and momentum.

From the outset, this project was about brand repositioning with substance.

We began by uncovering the business’s core truths: engineering excellence, practical transformation and a collaborative mindset. From there, we created a strategic foundation that could support both internal alignment and external trust. The result was Crosstide: a name and identity built around the idea of The Energy of Change, expressing movement, progress and the intersection of people, technology and ambition.

The new brand was designed to feel assured and mature while remaining modern and human. That balance mattered. Crosstide was expanding into more conservative sectors, including financial services, and needed a more refined brand presence to speak confidently to enterprise decision-makers. At the same time, the identity had to reflect the dynamism and forward motion at the heart of the business.

This is why branding for tech companies requires more than surface-level design. The best technology brands are built at the point where business strategy, verbal identity and visual identity all meet. In Crosstide’s case, the work brought those elements together into a clearer and more compelling whole.

We’re especially pleased that this project was recognised because it reflects the kind of work we care most about: helping ambitious businesses translate complexity into clarity. Whether we are delivering brand strategy for technology companies, repositioning a specialist consultancy or creating a new identity for a growing digital business, our aim is always the same — to build brands that create confidence, alignment and long-term value.

We’re hugely grateful to the Crosstide team for their openness, trust and collaboration throughout the process. Their belief in the opportunity, and willingness to embrace meaningful change, made this work possible.

And of course, a huge well done to our team for the strategic thinking, creativity and craft behind the project.

See the project case study here.