Announcing Cicero’s New Brand
Today we’re excited to share an updated look for Cicero: a new logo and website. Cicero has evolved significantly over the past fourteen years, and as we got ready to update our website this year, we realized it was time for a refresh to our brand as well.
The evolution of a logo
Cicero was launched in 2006, primarily as an API service to help folks more accurately match addresses to local legislative districts. This was reflected in our earliest logomark, which strove to iconize the API interaction as two offset triangles representing the interface between two applications.
As more organizations used Cicero to connect their members with their elected representatives, the opposing triangles also came to symbolize democracy for our team: an active process that is engaged when an individual reaches out to their elected officials or vice versa. As the years progressed, Cicero was enabling dozens of organizations to improve their advocacy efforts and engage with the political map.
In 2012, ahead of a major U.S. election, we refreshed our logo for the first time. We updated our colors and font and moved the logomark to precede the logotype, which echoed other modern logo placements.
In 2015, we launched a brand new website, and again gave the logo a small refresh, still holding onto those triangles.
Other competitors in the space had been using the partisan colors of red and blue in their logos, but we wanted our brand to echo our commitment to nonpartisanship, a value we deeply believe in. We leaned into the green color in our mark, updated the text to a neutral gray, and added additional accent colors in our new website.
Meet Cicero’s new brand
Today, our API is still widely used, but Cicero has evolved to become much more than that. Our data has fueled hundreds of applications and is available through CRMs, enterprise advocacy tools, social media platforms, and countless elected official lookups.
Our previous logo had carried our team through some exciting years of growth, but there were a few ways in which we felt it could be improved:
- Our team felt we had outgrown the mark: Cicero is more than an API and we wanted this to be reflected.
- Cicero’s logo didn’t hint at the more lofty ideals we believe our product upholds: democracy, advocacy, and civic engagement.
- Resizing the custom typography in the logotype had historically caused legibility issues both in print and on the web.
We needed a brand that reflects Cicero’s growth as a product: Cicero is now a global resource for elected official information and geographic data on elections and democracy. It was time to retire the API symbol in our logomark in favor of one that represents the crux of what Cicero does.
As we worked to refine Cicero’s new logo, we wanted to draw a clearer connection between our brand and democracy and civic engagement. We introduced a version of a check mark as our new logomark. The check calls to mind the process of voting, perhaps one of the most symbolic and physical actions taken in a democracy.
The check mark is also a nod to the decisive actions taken by our users every day in order to advance their missions. At the same time, we updated the logotype to reflect Cicero’s maturity as a product, without losing the humanist elements of the previous treatment.
We’re excited about our new brand, and hope it does a better job of communicating our dedication to maintaining the world’s most accurate database of legislative districts and elected officials.
To learn more, check out our new website, or reach out with any questions.
