Designing the New Keepsafe Logo
Finding the personal side of privacy
When we set out to redesign the Keepsafe logo and re-vamp the overall product experience, Keepsafe had been in business for over 4 years. In that time, over 50 millions people worldwide made the Keepsafe Photos app the trusted space to safeguard their most important photos—unpublished and for their eyes only.
The original Keepsafe logo, a blue castle keep, communicated the values of security and strength, important pillars of a company committed to digital privacy. However, security only represents part of the Keepsafe brand. Our customers care about security, about having their information safe and protected. But there’s more to the story.
The way we think about digital privacy reflects the way we think about real world privacy: we want to separate what is truly personal and important from everything else. We want to put our most valuable and personal things away somewhere safe: in a box, a vault, a drawer, between the pages of a well-loved book. When we put something away, we give it emotional value as well as security.
This insight served as a jumping-off point to the next phase: finding a mark that felt more modern and bold, a mark that better represented a personal space, letting you separate the important from the rest, the freedom and confidence you have when you’re in control. Not just because you might be afraid of being hacked, but because some things are personal.
From keywords to visual direction
We started with a strategic set of brand exercises that allowed us to focus on the how, what and why of our brand and define our manifesto.
From there, we explored keywords and assembled moodboards to open and inspire the conversation about which visual strategies made the most sense for the brand.
We quickly found that overlapping geometric shapes offered a friendly representation of encryption—the breaking into pieces, the construction and deconstruction of data. Introducing multiple colors allowed for personalization and help us stand out from the sea of blue corporate logos, representing our more complex approach to digital privacy.
Arriving at an icon and symbols
Guided by our new approach to representing Keepsafe, and a better understanding of how we wanted our brand to make people feel, we arrived at a visual solution we love. You can read it as an abstracted letter K or as two separate parts that represent motion into a box — the act of putting something away. The icon is thoughtful. It’s approachable. It’s discreet and feels trustworthy.
More playful experimentation led us to expand the brand vocabulary to include an array of versatile symbols. This collection gives us a visual language that we can draw on to enrich the entire user experience.
Constructing the wordmark
For the wordmark, we eventually found the right elements by combining two typefaces: Avenir and Hurme Geometric Sans. We modified the letter k to mirror the brand icon, and added a curved serif to the letter a to give the mark a friendly and personal feel. We decided to make the logo icon and the wordmark two separate representations of Keepsafe, designed to appear independent of each other.
The new Keepsafe
Today, we’re excited to show off our new identity that represents everything Keepsafe stands for: a trustworthy product that gives you security and encryption as much as it gives you a personal space to put things away; the confidence, empowerment and freedom to control how you live your digital life.
“All human beings have three lives: public, private and secret.” — Gabriel García Márquez
