Bringing clarity and cohesion to a cybersecurity firm’s visual identity
In its short history, Tanium has been blazingly successful. The cybersecurity firm was only founded in 2007, but it has become a mainstay IT partner for corporate America with 2,000-plus employees and a valuation of over $9 billion.
Years of rapid growth, though, had strained a visual identity and design system that had been developed for a small start-up. The system was highly fragmented and was being used inconsistently across the company, with various team members across different divisions altering visual elements, and even color schemes, on the fly. Tanium wanted to make sure that everything from its website to its products and properties to its sales materials had a unified look and feel.
Tanium came to Godfrey Dadich to not only bring clarity and cohesion to its visual identity and design but to develop brand guidelines that employees could easily understand and fully embrace.
To begin that process, we took a deep dive into Tanium’s technology and culture, working closely with its marketing team to articulate core brand values.
A key part of Tanium’s success has been its mastery of endpoint management and security—“endpoint” being an IT term for any device connected to a network, such as a PC, laptop, smartphone, or server. Tanium’s message to customers is: “Experience complete visibility over all your endpoints and perform large-scale actions within minutes from the cloud, right now.” GDP’s strategy team distilled that to a succinct value proposition: “the power of certainty.”
We developed Tanium’s existing monogram, which centered on a red circle, into a flexible brand system that told a story about focus and the ability to see the big picture.
Ultimately, Tanium’s core brand language—its emphasis on visibility and certainty—served as the North Star for our design work. GDP’s design process was focused on working with—and within—some key Tanium visual parameters. Starting with the company’s existing logomark, designers found ways to extend, refine, and systematize the brand expression.
The logomark’s paired monogram, a white T reversed out of a red circle, inspired a flexible brand system that we dubbed “the Aperture.”
Further extending the metaphor of the Aperture, we articulated guidelines for the use of brand photography—specifying, for instance, a preference for warm colors and minimalist compositions. We even created a Photoshop filter to facilitate in-house photo editing and retouching in a brand-consistent manner.
Additionally, GDP developed bespoke iconography for Tanium—brand/marketing iconography as well as functional iconography that lives within its endpoint management platform (conveying, for instance, threat hunting or asset discovery and inventory).
We built out a series of icons based on the aperture design system that Tanium could scale across all of its marketing and functional iconography.
“GDP was working with a set logo and color palette, but we still managed to find interesting ways to build upon it and improve it,” says art director Natalie Estrada. “We’re proud of how the brand expression we crafted is approachable and human, and dodges the common design tropes that you so often see in the cybersecurity and IT space.”