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.