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Our Bold New Brand: Bringing Agreements to Life

Carla Weis
Summary5 min read

Docusign's head of Brand and Creative on how we built a new foundation and created a new brand that could bring our IAM vision to the world.

    • Our North Star
    • Our Logo
    • Our Creative Platform
    • The Agreement Trap
    • Our Team

Table of contents

The world knows Docusign as a digital dotted line — but that’s changing. 

As pioneers and leaders of the eSignature category, our brand has always been associated with the signature. It’s well established and much loved throughout the world by both senders and signers, but it's more representative of the last 20 years than the next 20 years.

We are now pioneering a new category — Intelligent Agreement Management — and launching a new platform for it with Docusign IAM. We think of it as a full company reinvention. We needed to do more than just refresh the brand — we needed to build a new foundation and create a brand that could bring the IAM vision to the world. This meant designing a new brand architecture, new logo marks, new color palette, new icon system, new sonic brand, and more.

Beginning today, you’ll start to see some of those changes show up in the world. Let me share more about our journey. 

Our North Star

Central to our rebranding effort is our new brand promise and tagline – Bringing Agreements to Life. Today, the valuable information agreements contain is trapped inside static, flat files. With Docusign IAM, we make every step of the agreement process smarter - bringing them to life - and help businesses transform agreement data into actionable insights, accelerate growth, and unlock new possibilities. This encapsulates our commitment to empowering our customers, whether in the workplace or at home, to streamline their agreement processes and unlock new possibilities.

Our previous brand was heavily associated with eSignature. We needed our new brand identity to emphasise our full intelligent agreement management category offering, reflecting the depth and breadth of our new solutions. 

eSignature continues to be a critical part of our agreement offerings, but it is no longer the sole focus of our company and logo. We call our new mark The Nexus. We combine cap D in bright Poppy overlapping with an agreement in rich Cobalt blue. At this intersection, the colors merge to an Inkwell, or what  we like to call The Shape of Agreements.

Our new logomark, the Nexus. Centered with what we call The Shape of Agreements.

Our new wordmark is now built from our custom typeface, Docusign Indigo. And while it looked perfectly beautiful typed out, we wanted to infuse more of our new personality and characteristics. Pulling inspiration from the Shape of Agreements, we crafted angled corners into both the D and I letterforms. We streamlined the U by removing the descender and brought the tail of the S in a bit closer to create a nestled space. Lastly, we dipped into the inktraps in the G and the N softening those intersections to create a very friendly, almost smile-like shape.

Evolution of the Docusign logo

And we’re excited about having a lot of fun with our new Nexus icon, using it as a container to show the vast array of how agreements can come to life.

Docusign logo

Our Creative Platform

Our previous visual system reflected office supplies and analog paperwork methods like sticky notes, highlighters, pens, and sign labels. This served us really well—in fact, we were among the first to pioneer neons in B2B SaaS, a trend that’s still growing.

As we build a brand for the next decade, we wanted to embrace colors that were still bold and vibrant, but more flexible and extensible for years to come. We also created a robust spectrum to lean into our different brand personality traits: Smart, Dependable, Encouraging, and Transformative.

Docusign color palette

But this motif no longer reflects where we want to go. We've crafted a new visual identity that is modern, dynamic, and unmistakably Docusign. 

We've translated the essence of our brand promise, "Bringing Agreements to Life," into a dynamic creative platform we've coined as "Dynamic Connection." This platform not only breathes life into static documents, turning them into vibrant agreements, but also fosters connections between involved parties while seamlessly integrating with your business systems.

New illustrations, pictograms, and custom assets are now a part of our brand system and will give us extensibility for a long time to come.

Docusign brand activations

The Agreement Trap

Speaking of custom assets, creating identifiable assets that are unique to our new category and our positioning was top of mind for our brand strategy. We built out a series of illustrations and animations that visually show the pain when data, time, money, and opportunity are trapped inside static documents and disconnected from everyday business systems.

The Agreement Trap

There’s really so much more. Watch our new brand reel to see the fullness of everything we’ve created. 

Explore more of our brand vision at brand.docusign.com.

Our Team

Lastly, I’m most proud to share that this work was completed by our in-house brand and creative team. A small but mighty team who moved mountains over the last four short months. From refining our brand strategy to crafting our new visual identity, each teammate has played a crucial role in this transformative journey. To the team: Your passion and dedication have not only reshaped our brand but have also set us on a path toward greater success and innovation. Thank you.

We’re thrilled to welcome all agreement signers, senders, and the broader world at large into this exciting journey of a new era for Docusign.

Carla Weis
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