Announcing Keep’s Visual Refresh

Tailoring our visual identity to better reflect our mission on security and privacy

Published in

Keep Network

4 min readApr 4, 2019

We’re proud to officially announce updates to our visual identity and design system. You’ve probably already seen it adorning our website, Business Primer and social media accounts, so we’d like to spend a moment describing what some of these changes mean. This milestone for our brand represents a tailoring of our visual identity to better align with our mission to build the most robust, secure ecosystem for interacting with private data on public blockchains.

Old Meets New

We’ve always been proud of our bold logo imbued with parapets. Our logo is a mainstay for the Keep brand—symbolic of strength and security. The parapets form an iconic fortress. In the middle ages, castles built by European nobility featured a fortified tower called a keep, which served as a refuge for safety during an attack. In such a technical industry, it’s important to anchor what we do in age-old symbols for security that give a deep sense of what we value.

Beyond our logo, however, our core visual conflicted with our tone and manner. The new designs rally around our mission: a decentralized store of data that you can trust. We provide secure off-chain data containers, which we call keeps. Each keep is supported by a member of the ecosystem, chosen at random by the Keep Random Beacon. (If you are unfamiliar with our project, you can find more about it on our blog, where we detail the technology we’re building.)

An Identity For Keep

We’ve designed an identity that fully embraces the vastness and specificity of tools and protocols that enable Keep to function. Our tone and manner is confident, but not overly formal. Serious, but not stodgy. We think of Keep as sturdy, durable, tough, and protective, while remaining approachable and honest. We think protecting valued data is relatable to all people, so it was important that our identity represent our core values in privacy and security.

Typography

We swapped out the delicate typeface for one that is sturdy, yet approachable. It makes for robust headlines and soft body copy.

Color

We added additional hues to compliment the memorable electricGreen we’ve used and built equity in since launching. The colors are inspired by the same blend of new and old provenance in our brand.

Photography & Overlays

Black and white photography brings grit and rugged textures within the color palette. Overlays of color afford flexible opportunities for bringing focus to topics we discuss about our values and products.

Patterns & Textures

Keep is comprised of various tools, protocols, and primitives that can work independently or in concert, making the ecosystem stronger. The patterns below are built of iconography based on those components and integrated with textures that are inspired by both natural and man-made defenses.

What’s Next?

As Keep marches to mainnet, we will be updating our visual identity to be cohesive across where we show up today. We’re excited for our design system to help bring more of Keep to life as its key components are introduced and built. Everything from tutorials, videos, and diagrams to interactions, interfaces, and products—you name it!

Most of all, we’re excited for you to begin making use of Keep in your own work. We hope our new design system resonates with you and as always, we welcome your feedback. Join us on Slack to connect and collaborate!