Acquired by Sonar
Case Study
Gitar
AI code review
Making AI-written code something engineering teams can trust.
Gitar was founded by the team behind Uber's developer infrastructure. Its agent reviews code and plans migrations, handing engineers pull requests ready to land.
BABCO built the brand, the product interface, and the marketing site, and carried the identity onto social and stage until Sonar acquired the company.
The opportunity
Gitar had a founding team with real credibility and a product that changes how code reaches production. Among a crowd of look-alike AI developer tools, it needed a brand and interface engineering leaders would trust with their codebase.
Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, Gitar’s founder and CEO, pushed every surface toward proof, starting with the team’s record at Uber.
01
A precise identity with depth
We refined Gitar’s brand book around its precise geometry, adding purple tones and soft smoke treatments for depth, with a dark-mode palette and status colors that stay legible on any screen.
Type pairs SF Pro Display for reading and interface text with Menlo for the wordmark and primary controls.
02
Turn a migration into next steps
We designed the dashboard, onboarding, migration views, pull-request review, and settings. The core problem was turning a complex code migration into steps an engineer could trust.
The dashboard moved from metrics to precomputed recommendations, each with a plain-language rationale and a clear state, from ready to land to needs attention. Counts like connected repos moved into the header, so the main area stays on the work.
03
Keep the agent in context
The work and Jimmy, Gitar’s agent, sit side by side in a two-pane workspace, so an engineer can follow a plan and act on it without losing their place. Code-review feedback goes to GitHub, and chat is kept for refining the plan.
We also took motion out of the main workspace. Constant spinners and progress bars gave way to step-level statuses and quiet completion badges.
04
A site built around the benefit
The marketing site leads with two benefits, merging more code faster and CI for the age of AI, backed by on-prem deployment and enterprise security. It opens on the team’s record building Uber’s developer stack.
Product demos run as video while supporting sections use still workflow views, so no screen plays more than one film at a time. Pricing moved off the homepage to keep it on the benefit and sign-up.
05
One system, from social to stage
We carried the identity across Gitar’s social profiles and into posters, stage graphics, apparel, and stickers.
Each piece draws on the same palette and geometry, so the company looked the same in a release post as it did on stage, through to its acquisition by Sonar.
“Big thanks to Olivia Batraski and her amazing design team at BABCO® for the wonderful partnership with Gitar. Really proud of the brand design they created for us.”
Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai · Founder & CEO, Gitar
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