The new frontier of tax compliance.

Sphere’s vision reached far beyond sales tax, but finance leaders still needed to see how it connected to the taxes their businesses actually manage. Working from Sphere’s company narrative, we shaped its product positioning and the messages that guide the brand. That gave the website a clear way to introduce indirect tax, input tax and e-invoicing as parts of one growing suite.

Every market writes its own tax law and guards its sovereignty, which is why no one has been able to standardise it. Instead, TRAM reads that law and turns it into something a business can act on, and that became the idea at the centre of the brand: Decoding Global Trade. We drew a decoding device from the segments of Sphere’s logo, so whenever tangled information resolves into something clear, it reads as Sphere at work rather than generic AI.

TRAM reads trade law from 130 tax authorities, and a platform that felt US-centric would tell most of Sphere’s buyers they were an afterthought. Before design began, we agreed one principle with Sphere’s team to guide every decision: Borderless by Design. Each touchpoint had to feel at home in whichever market a customer is expanding into.

Companies come to Sphere because they want to grow into new markets, so its art direction needed to show what that reach looks like on the ground, not from orbit. We set a direction built on street-level views of real cities, framed as if the viewer were standing there. It places Sphere inside the markets its customers are aiming for, and ties tax compliance to the opportunity on the other side of it.

Finance leaders judge a tax provider by how well it knows the detail, so Sphere’s voice had to show that knowledge rather than claim it. The copy draws on real tax rules, named authorities and local filing requirements, all explained in plain language. And when the site tells buyers it shouldn’t be their job to understand the world’s tax systems, it quietly adds that it’s Sphere’s.

Sphere doesn’t only sell to companies expanding abroad. Billing and commerce platforms embed it, putting Sphere to work for their own users, and accounting firms recommend it, or white-label it, once clients outgrow advisory-led processes. So alongside products, we organised the site around who is buying. Each route makes its own argument, but all of them lead back to the same engine: TRAM.

Most tax platforms grew up on US sales tax and treat everywhere else as an add-on, which is exactly where Sphere’s buyers get stuck. The homepage leads with that contrast: tax compliance was built for the US, and Sphere was built for the world. Its animated masthead begins with what goes wrong when a company expands abroad, such as a filing rejected in a new market, before showing Sphere taking the work away.

Finance teams running several entities need to know where they owe tax, and they need to be able to explain the numbers to an auditor. We designed product screens that let them move between entities, watch their exposure build and trace a calculation back through the tax code and TRAM’s reasoning. Those screens set a design language Sphere’s team could carry into the rest of the product.