Ironclad Has Rebranded and You’re the Reason Why

In October, we debuted our new Ironclad look — our new brand. 

On practically every page, most dramatically our home page, we’ve pulled back the curtain on individuals who make up our diverse community. We’re honored to serve them and felt strongly that they deserved a specific illustration style to highlight their individuality. 

If you haven’t already, take a look at our Home Page, Product Page and Community Page.

Why a rebrand and why now?

First, a bit of history. Our first logo and lightweight brand expression was created just five days before Ironclad’s presentation at Y-Combinator Demo Day in 2015, which is impressive considering how well it would serve Ironclad for four solid years. 

A year ago, however, the Ironclad team started to notice that our legacy brand was no longer aligning with the company’s vision for the future. Moreso, in action, the brand wasn’t scalable and didn’t feel like a premium product. For example, the logo would degrade when used too small or get lost in a collection of logo salads. Worse, our illustration style was a little too juvenile for the legal space, and our color palette was unremarkable in the 2019 landscape.

Upon further investigation, we discovered that our inspiration —  the reason for our existence and something we celebrate in every meeting — was not being represented in our story. Think making a Marvel film and forgetting to cast the superhero. This hero, our superhero, is the Ironclad Community. The Ironclad Community consists of GCs, in-house counsel, legal ops professionals and, more broadly, anyone who comes in contact with a contract.

Aside from the occasional customer quote, our legacy website did not reveal who these folks were and how Ironclad helped them succeed. The moment we framed the rebrand so that the community was our main source of inspiration and not just another factor to consider, all rebrand decisions became crystal clear. 

That said, restructuring and redesigning an entire brand is a tall order and couldn’t have been done without our mighty team:

• Century Studio
• Jason Boehmig – Co-founder and CEO
• Cai GoGwilt – Co-founder and CTO
• Joyce Solano – CMO
• Blake Reary – Design Manager
• Lindsay Grizzard – Design and Development

Background on the new brand

In order to create strong brand elements centered around the Ironclad Community, we needed a solid foundation. Over several months we gathered dozens of people from across the company to define and cement the essence of our brand story, positioning and pillars.

You’ll see our brand pillars reflected in all of our brand elements, but especially in our new logo, which preserves the story behind our original icon-mark (representing two parties coming together with Ironclad at the center).

The new icon-mark is washed in our primary brand color, Illuminated Green, which symbolizes shining a light on the dark, mysterious world of contracts and now partnered with a friendlier word-mark. We’ve balanced this modern color with a family of traditional neutrals.

We developed a scalable illustration style with roots in traditional portrait painting and modern editorial fashion illustration. In fact, most of our brand expression visualizes the play between tradition and modernity — a direct inspiration from the Ironclad product, which modernizes the processes of generating, redlining, signing and maintaining contracts.

We’re also thrilled to have SangBleu Kingdom for our primary typeface. Sangbleu is a swiss-serif typeface rooted in the past featuring machined aspects apparent in the “g” or “t.” And our workhorse is Moderat, a friendly geometric/machined sans-serif typeface.

What’s next for our brand

You’ll start to see more brand moments on display as we expand our content offerings and community events. For example, we’re mounting our first Ironclad-hosted conference, Apex: The Modern GC Summit, next spring.

In the meantime, take a deeper exploration of our new brand — and the community that inspired it — by checking out Ironclad’s brand page, which also houses our new brand assets.