A New SendGrid Identity: An Inside Look at Our Logo Evolution

As a designer, it’s a great privilege and challenge to redesign a company’s logo, especially one, like SendGrid’s, that is so ingrained in the internal culture. I had the opportunity to do so as SendGrid prepared to show its evolution in the market.

In this post, I’ll share our goals for the redesign, our process, and the story of how we arrived at the logo design we proudly released yesterday.

Goals

• Evolve our brand identity to reflect SendGrid’s market expansion and growth
• Align our visual identity with our current mission and vision
• Update and modernize our visual brand, including: logo, business cards, presentation templates, signage, etc.
• Redesign our marketing website
• Keep the design in-house

Process and Strategy

Our first step was to deconstruct our current logo. We looked at what worked and what didn’t and arrived at some key areas for improvement:

• Arrows are moving backwards (our business is progressing and the arrows should show positive growth)
• Font is generic, not special–we deserve something unique
• When polled, most employees didn’t know what it is, which showed that we weren’t getting value out of the envelope concept

We clarified strategy for what we were trying to accomplish (see goals above) and then we began the design process. We spent countless hours designing new potential logos–a small sample of the many iterations we went through are shared below.

 

As some gained momentum, we made sure we had a checks-and-balances system. We created an internal focus group with members from across the company to weigh in. After gathering rounds of feedback from the focus group and internal design team we were able to hone in on some things that were working.

Creative Solution

We wanted the new SendGrid visual identity to be aligned with where we are headed. So we moved away from the ambiguous mobius strip with emails circling around it. The new mark is built on a grid which is representative of our grid-like infrastructure in which we send mail.

Arrows as Communication and Engagement

The shapes are comprised of two arrows coming together and overlapping in the middle. The arrows represent communication and the overlap represents engagement. The dark blue squares in the corner are the messages that each party is sending.

“I” as “One”

The type is another area of focus. We wanted the type to feel more modern and grown-up. We wanted to make the type equitable, so we made some slight alterations, with the most notable being the “i”. We wanted to make that stand out as a “1” which represents that we are one platform for all your communication needs.

Results

SendGrid does a great job of reflecting and finding room for improvement. Re-designing our logo was a great exercise in both. This evolution of our brand identity reflects SendGrid’s market expansion and growth and we’re excited to celebrate and share it with you.