Speakeasy

To fur­ther explore how a brand iden­ti­ty can res­onate with its audi­ence, we eval­u­ate oth­ers with­in the direct and broad indus­try who speak to the same audi­ence. Speakeasy need­ed to com­bat pre­con­ceived notions about machine-gen­er­at­ed code and its lim­i­ta­tions through their competitors. 

Dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion was very impor­tant, which meant explor­ing beyond the blues, pur­ples, blacks, and blue-greens of the land­scape. The Sin­gle Most Impor­tant Thing (aka SMIT) for this rebrand was to con­vey ​“Craft­ed by Design.” Speakeasy push­es the bound­ary of what peo­ple thought was pos­si­ble for machine-gen­er­at­ed code, and their tech­nol­o­gy pro­duces code that has real crafts­man­ship behind it, and quickly. 

Build­ing on Speakeasy’s brand attrib­ut­es, the new logo­type is dis­tinct and own­able. It con­sists of tech­ni­cal, mono­spaced let­ter­forms in which the ​“A” char­ac­ter is craft­ed to cre­ate two for­ward slash­es — a direct ref­er­ence to API endpoints. 

The sec­ondary mark of two slash­es car­ries that motif for­ward. The for­ward slash is a direct con­nec­tion back to end­points, rem­i­nis­cent of the way you’d see a for­ward slash in an end­point URL.

Using yel­low as a pri­ma­ry col­or is almost a refresh of the pre­vi­ous iden­ti­ty, which allowed us to car­ry over a bit of brand equi­ty while avoid­ing the cat­e­gor­i­cal clichés. We paired it with an off-black for high con­trast, along with more warm-lean­ing neu­trals. We set­tled on Everett for the type­face, a some­what stan­dard sans serif, but with its sharp angles and dras­tic cuts it feels tech­ni­cal in all of the right ways.