Kiip Rebrand: Refreshing Our Logo
Since joining the Kiip team early this year as the Lead Product Designer, I’ve been working hard to establish a professional, cohesive and expansive look and feel for the product that evolves with us as we grow. We enlisted a stellar brand designer — Michelle Arrowood — to help us discover the new direction.
This is part one of a series of posts that will dive into the Kiip rebrand and product redesign. Over the next few posts, I’ll dive deeper into the design process and philosophy that got us where we are today. Let’s do this!
First things first — The Logo
Our original mark was born out of our MVP (minimum viable product) and the need for something, anything, as a placeholder. While the combination of the blue color and folder icon established us in the document storage space, what about our future ambitions with the platform? We needed a new mark. It needed to be inclusive, accessible, scalable across platforms, stand out in the gov-tech space, and easily say “Kiip is here to help you access services.”
Letting the values lead the way
We began this process by examining our company values and discussing how they could inform our mark. Drawing on those values, we needed to begin exploring the spirit of the brand. What our brand should mean to users and partners alike. Capturing a feeling can be a bit trickier.
To identify that “spirit,” we started brainstorming iconography that aligned to different aspects of the product to see what started feeling right.
These categories included:
- Humanity - What speaks to the individuals who use it?
- Functionality - How do we convey what the app does?
- Security - How do we emphasize safety?
- Trustworthiness - How do we show that we are legit, official, and professional?
Exploration 1: Playing on Words
Exploring physical structures and strongholds that were fortified to hold & protect.
What does it mean to keep something?
🤔 This felt too institutional and ran the risk of feeling like it was locking up people instead of securing documents.
Exploration 2: Going all in on Security
Shifting the focus to a literal interpretation of keeping things safe.
How do we repurpose a lock in an ownable way to convey security?
🤔 Yes, locks signify security, but are possibly anxiety inducing, a little too intense — ex: What if you lose a key or forget a code?
Exploration 3: Leading with Functionality
Since we store documents for people, evolving the folder from our current logo seemed like a good place to play.
Can folders capture the essence of the brand?
🤔 While this direction puts us squarely in document storage space, we wondered if folders alone might limit a user’s perspective about what Kiip can do.
Exploration 4: Leaning into Humanity
Every individual is unique. Fingerprints capture that uniqueness and, as an increasingly common tool for “unlocking” devices, etc, they can also represent security.
🧐 This direction got us excited! While we liked the complex feelings this simple symbol could spark, there were concerns about an association with fingerprinting (incarceration, identity tracking, privacy concerns, etc) so we wanted to narrow in to see how we could adapt this symbol to capture the spirit of the brand.
Hitting the mark
Our brand designer continued to iterate on the fingerprint direction, simplifying the print and incorporating the word mark — and we had a winner.
This version of the mark captured the spirit we were looking for. The abstraction of the fingerprint into a shape reminiscent of a paperclip captured the humanity and functionality and when combined with the wordmark, it incorporated security as well.
The logo is both simple and hardworking. It’s true to what we do and stand for, scales nicely to make a memorable fav icon, and wears color really well.
Again, a huge shout-out goes to our brand designer, Michelle Arrowood. We think she crushed it.
Next up: Expanding the brand identity.
