Clef Website Redesign
Clef has launched a new website and a big brand update that is representative of our growth into enterprise markets. Here, we unpack the site and give you a little background info about our design choices.
Last week the Clef team introduced a new website to the world. A new landing place for Clef customers and folks interested in internet security to poke around and learn more about Clef and our products. The site consists of a palette of warm bright colors and bold direct text; a conscious departure from common in the security business space. In a lot of ways, the new site is representative of a parallel shift and expansion currently underway throughout the entire company, so I thought I’d take a moment to unpack elements of the new site in this context.
Over the past year, Clef has been refining its flagship product and finding its niche in enterprise markets. We’ve been running experiments and listening to our community about features and design that encourages wide adoption of better security practices. We want to make the best cryptography in the world accessible to everyone because when a critical number of individuals have more secure online accounts, the entire network gets a security boost and everyone benefits.
One of the challenges we face is that mobile cryptography and security protocols, in general, are complex highly technical topics about which regular folks tend to be ill-informed. When designing the Clef app, and our authentication login user flow, we wanted to remove the complexity as much as possible and in its place provide a sense of easy access. When people describe Clef as ‘magical,’ they are referring to the delightful experience of simple access to their friends, family, news and important information, without the multiple step frustration that has become the standard gateway for logging in. Each step requires complex yet trivial information bits to pass. These bits are known as usernames, passwords, security codes, and security questions. On many levels, ‘magical,’ as its applied to Clef, means ‘simple, functional, and more security without more frustration. It only seems magical because it is uncommon.
This is the central idea around which the Clef team has built the brand and the new website. We wanted to provide clear concise information about a complex topic in a friendly manner. We want to make mobile cryptography accessible to everyone with our product, but we also want to make knowledge about cryptography and online account security easy to digest, and maybe even interesting.
As you cruise around the new site, we hope that we explain all things Clef, but also that we spark your curiosity. Internet security is something that almost everyone interacts with every day in some way. For most people, they interact with security protocols at login and “forgotten password” exchanges at a fairly regular rate. We’ve all seen the result of high-profile hacked accounts. At Clef, we are working every day to keep your information private and secure, and part of that mission is increasingly baseline understanding about security in popular culture.
Throughout the site, you will find narrow colorful bands that the team has dubbed, “ribbons.” These ribbons interlink Clef communities and create paths through the website. One can travel throughout the entire site by clicking the links in these sections. It’s Clef’s version of “choose your own adventure.” getClef.com/business
One main stop on any tour of Clef is the security page. It’s no surprise that security is central to Clef. We took a narrative approach to presenting information on this page, meaning one can read the page from top to bottom and information is presented linearly with baseline info on the top and more detailed technical info as your scroll down the page. Over the next few months, we will be adding lots of interactive features and call outs to deliver as much information as any person is interested in consuming. getClef.com/security
Clef serves a number of interdependent communities including:
- Our business partners — People who represent companies that integrate Clef for login to protect their user accounts from fraud.
- Our developer community — People who build the integrations for their own web applications or one of our business partners.
- Everyone — All of the people who use Clef to log in every day.
We’ve created a special place to serve each of our communities with information about Clef that directly applies to them, but anyone can click through the ribbons and be connected to other communities and other parts of the site easily. getClef.com/developers
We’ve also introduced Clef folks to the world with this release. Clef has a wide variety of applications in all sorts of online spaces so we wanted to showcase that variety on our website by showing regular folks who use Clef for logging in to professional tools, developer environments, and gaming and social media sites. Clef keeps information safe in all these places for everyone. Everyone can use Clef, and everyone can learn about online security. One of Clef’s core principles is “fight the default of exclusion.” Up until now, this principle has been front and center in the real world, but now we are realizing it in our brand and marketing materials as well. We made a conscious effort to be inclusive and not fall into a trap that a lot of startups fall into when they only show similar types of people on their website and in marketing materials. The Clef folks are unique and different, but they all interact with internet security every day. getClef.com/everyone
We are very excited and proud to offer you this new website as Clef turns a corner in its development as an enterprise product. We hope you grow to love the website and the Clef folks as much as we have in the office. It’s just the beginning. Over the coming months, we will be adding a number of interactive features and Clef folks scenes to help the world to get to know Clef and be informed about mobile cryptography and the coming passwordless revolution. We have big new product announcements and oft-requested features on the horizon. Finally, we want to acknowledge and appreciate you. We are so grateful to all of you, our early followers and friends. Y’all keep us going and we appreciate all the love you’ve so generously given. Thank you. Onward and upward. Go to getClef.com now.
