Before the refresh, Ironclad’s brand was simple and clean, but lacking definition or distinction. It relied on many of the typical start-up tech basics like flat illustration, tech-blue colors, and stiff san-serifs. This was a perfectly workable brand for a new company, but as Ironclad’s notoriety and funding shot through the roof, it needed a brand to match the trajectory.

The two items that were requested for the new brand was to keep the icon mark somewhat similar and use an updated color palette, not something completely new.

These pillars were crucial in the decision making process. Whenever strategy got too vague or choices too many, we referred back to these pillars. These came from a large amount of work with our agency and strategy partners and pair well with the brand story.

The logo iteration was a team effort. As with most logo refreshes, we did many more rounds of feedback than expected. The most successful part of this process was bringing in various members of the executive team to get their involvement and input. After a few jam sessions with stakeholders, we sent our modified designs to the agency and had them refine the details.

An important lesson I learn and re-learn in each agency brand partnership, is that, at the end of months of work, you generally only receive a few slides and mockups of the “new brand”.

Taking this one-pager style guide and turning it into a living, breathing brand system is my favorite part of a brand refresh project. As one-half of the full brand team, I took on anything and everything related to digital design. This meant fleshing out the website, email, social and more to start. This also involved hiring a web agency, creating re-usable templates in Figma, and building out our small-but-mightly design system.

Ironclad's rebrand was done on a tight timeline and an even tighter budget. Rebrands done in that way usually have plot holes or whole pieces of the brand that aren't completely considered. For Ironclad, the main evolutions to the brand were in our primary color (she is giving enterprise dark these days), a more scalable illustration style (the style was stunning, but too hard to reproduce at scale), and photography. Photography in particular was only talked about as a future concept when we did the rebrand because we knew it would be at least a year before photoshoot budgets came in.

Below are some of the evolutions to the look and feel of the brand. You can also check out the evolution of the brand in my other projects for Ironclad like the Spring or Winter State of Digital Contracting projects.