Speakeasy

Speakeasy is accelerating innovation by making it easy for developers to create or consume any API.

APIs facilitate communication between two software components, which is often the initial stage for development. Speakeasy allows a single builder to harness the talent and work of hundreds in a couple lines of code with support through high-quality software development kits, API tooling, and developer tools. With their previous visual identity, Speakeasy was severely limited.

Visit Speakeasy

Before our project together, there were inconsistencies between their tone and visuals, and the brand was built on a bright and playful color palette that didn't really match who they are and what they offer. Brand elements lacked strategy, or at least a consistent conceptual narrative.

Innovative, Crafted, and Prolific were chosen as their three words. Innovative because they’re revolutionizing the game with machine-generated code. Crafted because they set an insanely high bar with quality, and Prolific because they push updates to their product incessantly. 

Dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion was very impor­tant, which meant explor­ing beyond the blues, pur­ples, blacks, and blue-greens of their land­scape. The Sin­gle Most Impor­tant Thing (aka SMIT) for this rebrand was to con­vey ​this idea of “Craft­ed by Design.” 

Speakeasy push­es the bound­ary of what peo­ple thought was pos­si­ble for machine-authored code, and their 
tech writes code that has real crafts­man­ship behind it, and quickly. 

Build­ing on Speakeasy’s brand attrib­ut­es, the new logo­type is dis­tinct and own­able. It con­sists of tech­ni­cal, mono­spaced let­ter­forms in which the ​“A” char­ac­ter is craft­ed to cre­ate two for­ward slash­es — a direct ref­er­ence to API endpoints. 

For the uninitiated, An endpoint is essentially the storage place of the resources an API needs to operate. They typically look a little something like this: 

https://api.spotify.com/v1/albums/{id}

The sec­ondary logomark of two slash­es car­ries that motif for­ward. It’s perfectly suited and scalable for small-size applications.

Using yel­low as a pri­ma­ry col­or is almost a refresh of the pre­vi­ous iden­ti­ty, which allowed us to car­ry over a bit of brand equi­ty while avoid­ing the cat­e­gor­i­cal clichés. We paired it with an off-black for high con­trast, along with more warm-lean­ing neu­trals. 

We set­tled on Everett from Type Weltkern for the brand type­face. It’s a some­what standard sans serif, but with its sharp angles and dras­tic cuts it feels tech­ni­cal in all of the right ways. We use Everett Mono for an additional, tech-forward accent. 

During an early round, we explored wireframes as a concept, and while it wasn’t chosen as a logo direction, we pushed the idea further for Speakeasy’s visual language.

After all, Speakeasy at its core is about creating, managing, and consuming APIs — 
a highly technical and complicated endeavor — allowing developers to do so with better, more streamlined communication.
 

The wireframe assets can be simple and straightforward, or they can be more maximal. 

For those more maximal applications, we developed an entire character set using our wireframe construction, because nothing calls to mind the concept of a speakeasy quite like a hidden, coded language.

To do so, we started with a clean 6x6 grid, then began designing letterforms according to our grid. 

The wireframe characters can be scaled and cropped, or grouped together to include a hidden message in a composition. They can be used at high contrast as an intriguing visual. 

Or they can be used more covertly with low contrast to create more of a textural background effect. Doing so also creates a nice grid structure within which to house content.

“Overall, I was really struck by the very strong process, and the bar that you set. I think this has definitely been the best run engagement that I've ever had with a contractor in all of my previous work, actually.”

-Simon Yu, Co-Founder, Speakeasy

We built this brand in 6 weeks. After the rebrand, Speakeasy went on to raise $11M in their seed/pre-seed round of fundraising, and an additional $15M in their Series A. Not all of that success can be chalked up to visual brand, but it’s one of the intanglibles that certainly helped in their evaluations. That’s a win in my book.