Cobalt

Cobalt had a good product, a devoted following, and a visual identity assembled from whatever was nearest to hand. Nothing was wrong exactly, but the docs, the marketing site, and the product each looked like they came from different companies.

Starting from the documentation

Unusually, we designed the documentation first. For a developer tool, docs are the brand — they are where people spend real time and form an opinion. Everything else was derived from decisions we made there: the type scale, the code treatment, the way we handle emphasis without shouting.

A mark that survives 16 pixels

The mark is a plain geometric form that reads at favicon size and does not need the wordmark to work. We tested it as a terminal glyph before we tested it on a billboard, because the terminal is where it actually appears.

Where it landed

One system now covers docs, product, marketing, and print, with a token layer shared between the design files and the front-end. The founder's original logo lives on in the changelog, which felt like the right place for it.