Ryan Schlesinger


Work

About

Retell





June - July 2026
Identity, Strategy, Art Direction, Web, Motion

Credits
Halaska Studio, Yun Hsuan (Claire) Lin Project Description
Retell AI is a voice artificial intelligence platform enabling businesses to build, deploy, and manage AI-powered phone and voice agents. These agents manage human-like conversations across inbound and outbound calls.

My Role
Coming in as a contract consultant tasked to refine Retells’ brand identity, they had strong foundations that were mismanaged over time, resulting in design debt across their website and brand. To build on the recent brand work an outside agency had done on their logo, I developed a new direction and motion identity for Retell, to connect to their mission and product, while escaping common design trends for AI voice models.





Color, Typography, IdentityRetell did not want to stray far from their original identity with saturated blues, navy, and a serif/sans-serif pairing, I developed clear guides that gave direction to the usage of colors and typefaces.

The mismanagement of these components led to reduced legibility and a lack of reasoning behind their use. Key areas of pain included inconsistent and unclear usage of color, and the condensed serif used in small dense areas of text, such as testimonials. Therefore, these guides clearly outlined the hierarchy of color and type usage across different brand moments, keeping the identity intact while eliminating mismanagement and misuse.













Motion System
Drawing from retells core values of innovation and evolution within human communication, the motion system plays off of vintage and modern forms of visualizing audio and actual motion within phone/voice calls. 

The motion of the logo within-conversation wraps a linear dot waveform around a circle, creating a unique audio-reactive motion linked to any conversation. 

The circular motion and arragement of the logo is reminiscent of vintage rotary phones, requireing the physical movement of the circle to dial a number.

By drawing from past visualizations and techniques, these movments ground Retells motion design in human-centered forms and connect to their message and mission; creating a unique and identity-defining look that moves past the industry-standard gradient blobs and circles common for voice agents.














Web



Web was the largest indicator of design debt across the entire brand implementation, with missused colors and typography across the board, especially on deeper pages. 

To combat this and make it easier for future designers, I templatized common pages and pro-blocks for product features and solutions in order to improve upon the current design, while ensuring future pages for products, solutions, etc., remain on-brand within the proper guidelines.

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