Our brand update unpacked.

Today marks the day that we launch our updated brand.

We’re excited to share it with the world, and in this blog, I shine some light on some of the decisions and how we arrived at our final visual design.

Beware, this is a chunky write-up, but I hope it’s insightful into how these things come into being. I have always craved a meaty write up of the thought process and outputs of a rebrand project, so I’m creating this as the kind of thing I wished I had to hand at the start of our journey.

I'll also be writing a follow up with some lessons learnt - this is very much a deep dive into the various aspects of our new brand.

So, rewind to last year.

I, and others in the team here, including Lauren King , our VP of marketing, felt a big change was needed for our brand.

It had been a year of reinvention at Speechmatics, and that transformation-cake needed a cherry.

The prior 18 months had been one of extremely fast paced change in the space. Though Speechmatics can trace its origins to founder Tony Robinsons’ work at Cambridge University in the 1980s, the space had really heated up in the last two years, with 2021-2023 seeing an unprecedented number of new entrants and tech giants moving into space.

In this time our market had become far more competitive, and despite Speechmatics ability to not only compete but to beat these huge players on a product level, the brand itself had not kept pace with the technical innovation happening inside its own walls.

So, the aim was to give the brand a shot in the arm, to make it feel modern, to reflect our position in AI market and to reflect that, despite our relatively small size (compared to the like of Google, Amazon and Microsoft who now offer speech-to-text), we were an expert and leader in the space.

Where does one even start with something like that?

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Our starting point

Our project started where all good rebrands do – by asking ourselves some tough questions and doing a lot of research. There are a few frameworks to help guide this process; we picked a fairly simple approach - descriptors.

Descriptors are a small number of words that you would like the public to use when describing you brand and products.

For example when you think of ‘Apple’, ‘British Airways’, or ‘McDonalds’ what words spring to mind? There’s a good chance these are pretty close to what a brand team somewhere has decided their descriptors are.

Of course they might not use exactly these words, but many can be grouped and folded under some nice broad terms. These may also never be mentioned explicitly in any future marketing campaigns or copy, but act as a guide for how you want people to feel when they interact with your brand, and can therefore be helpful when making decisions - want to be an exclusive brand? Probably shouldn't offer mass-market discount codes. Want to be an approachable brand? Stick to light and bright colours.

These are then used throughout the process to judge any new approaches and ideas. Setting these upfront can reduce the number of conflicting opinions later down the line. The question shifts from ‘do you like this?’ to ‘does this fit with our descriptors?’.

We found three descriptors that felt central to what we were trying to achieve:

• Premium – very much a part of Speechmatics DNA is its commitment to quality. The standards for our technology are unashamedly high, and despite price pressure caused by growth in the number of competitors in the space, we wanted to be the brand of choice for people looking for the best, not the cheapest option.
• Innovative – our history is full of technological breakthroughs, the latest and biggest is a self-supervised learning approach to how we model and transcribe languages (you can read about Ursa here). We release new updates and improvements to our service almost weekly, and are constantly looking for the next big breakthrough for speech technology. R&D has always been core to our success, and will always be central to how we operate.
• Inclusive – Understand Every Voice is our company mission, and that word “every’ is important. We make our tests for the quality of our ASR deliberately difficult, so that we always know if we can understand those with different accents, dialects, and from different socio-economic backgrounds. This is core for us – technology can only be transformative if it works for everyone.

Worth noting is that initially to get these we simply talked to people about Speechmatics and how they perceived it, taking notes. Quickly three 'buckets' appeared, where we could group these words. Then it was a case of working through what the headings for each should be - for example 'Premium' started life as 'Trusted', and 'Innovative' could have been 'Forward Thinking' - there's no right answer here, only what feels best.

The above were decided early on and have remained steady throughout this process. A good sign for a company’s leadership is that they were all in agreement about how we wanted to be perceived in the market.

These descriptors however are abstract ideas and can manifest in a variety of different ways.

For example, Hermes, Heinz, Apple, and Adobe are all ‘premium’ brands – leaders in their market and the choice of people looking for quality, not low cost. And yet their branding is all very different.

?So how should we bring these descriptors to life?

?For this we needed a different avenue of research. Make that avenues.

Research

Here we just wanted to dive into some visually rich avenues that could be associated with Speechmatics and what we do, without a specific end goal in mind. We would then incorporate them into concepts and ideas and see what worked.

This took us in a lot of directions, not only into how brands get across the above descriptors, but from other places too. That included how sound is recorded, and visualised (given it is mostly invisible), how people communicate, to the gothic architecture of Cambridge University, where this all started.

• Speechmatics – we have a proud heritage in the city of our HQ – Cambridge. A university city, famed for its river, punts, and beautiful gothic architecture, which uses symmetry and circles throughout its design.?

• Sound – largely invisible to the eye, we delved into various ways that sound has been recorded and visualised over the years. Chladni plates was a particularly interesting avenue – they show the extraordinary shapes that are created when you play a tone through a plate covered in fine dust or sand. These show vividly how sound, though invisible, can impact the physical.?

• Language – spoken language has been around for 150,000 years and is always changing and evolving. New words and language emerge, others are lost. Language is messy, dynamic, never static.

• Communication – more than words or sounds we also looked at how people collaborate and share their ideas and thoughts as a group. In many ways communication is far bigger than ‘just’ speech.

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Of course, not all of this can end up in a final brand identity. But all of these acted as springboards for exploration, and gave us plenty to play around with. There’s nothing worse than a blank page, so these were great at getting the ball rolling.

In all our early thinking, we also wanted to make sure that we didn’t fall into the trap of the obvious.

Speech and sound are nearly always represented in the same way – speech bubbles, and sound waves. We worked hard to find something more unique than this that was still meaningful and grounded in what we do.

We also wanted to avoid looking too closely at our competitors. I have always felt by dwelling on them too long, you can become everything you sought to avoid, simply because their brand occupies some space in your creative mind. We kept a quarter of on eye on them, but no more.

Great brands look inside themselves and build from there, and as much as possible build from that introspection. Leaders in any market are true to themselves and don’t seek to imitate those around them. As the name implies, they lead, not follow.

Speechmatics has an interesting history, a bold and inclusive mission, and is fortunate to be right in the heart of a fast-moving AI space. A good rebrand will draw from all of these and still feel unique and feel right on a very unscientific, ‘gut feel’ level.

I also wanted a measure of success of this project to be the sense that our team felt enormously proud of our brand, and wanted to show it off to anyone that would listen.

So, where have we ended up?

Colour

Anyone that has ever been near a brand project will know that colours are emotive, subjective and something that stirs up a lot of opinion.

For us, this is where we felt we could lean in on our ‘inclusive’ and ‘premium’ descriptors. Often ultra-exclusive brands strip everything back and can even be monochromatic in their design. Brands that promote accessibility, inclusivity and a broad audience instead often have broader colour palettes, giving them both an intuitive sense of welcoming a broad audience but also the flexibility to tailor their design for a given section of their audience.

It might seem like there is some tension here – being both premium and inclusive might seem like a contradiction. For us, it is not – we build the best product in the market, but our goal is that the product itself understand a broad range of voices across languages, accents, geographies, and backgrounds, in dozens of industries.

After some exploration above with unlimited choice, we changed direction - we chose to pick colours from the Radix design system, as a parallel project was underway to uplift our portal, and this would use Radix as the basis for its design. Radix has a smaller (but still big) colour palette to choose from. This helped a little to avoid the paralysis of choice.

Our chosen palette leans on more natural colours to reflect our grounding in human experience, and is bold, bright, reflecting our optimism about the power of our technology to change the world for the better. The green is a slight nod to the Cambridge blue of the older brand, though Cambridge graduates will shout that this is most decidedly not Cambridge blue. To them I would say it’s not blue anyway (it’s definitely green), and it’s a nod, not a copy.

We did try a couple of more typical 'tech' options - more blues, purples, dark colours, but it immediately felt at odds with our inclusivity and optimism as a company. They also felt very, very safe. So, the warmer, brighter colours emerged.

To maintain our premium feel though, we knew that much of the time we would use our neutral palette, with our colours used as highlights and accents, without becoming overwhelming to our audience. White space would be our friend, as would tints of our chosen colours.

We also deliberately have not been too prescriptive about the uses of colours at this stage – for example we have not assigned colours to each of our languages, or capabilities, or key industries we work in.

I’ve always been a fan of ‘desire paths’ – a concept from urban planning that teaches us that despite the best planning, often we don’t always understand ahead of time how people will use a space. In this context, I felt that Speechmatics is still a rapidly evolving company, and any strict adherence to rules with the colour palette might lead to constraint.

The only exception to this has been the use of Cyan across our website and portal as our primary accent colour, to create a consistent experience throughout our website and portal. Cyan works well as a neutral colour without intrinsic meaning (green for good, for example) and therefore can be used liberally in a product without confusion for the user.

Our visual expression – the Echo

An early breakthrough was on visual expression, distinct from our logo and colour palette. Think Burberry’s distinctive pattern, or Apple’s curved edges, or Adidas’ three stripes. These can make almost anything feel like it belongs to that brand, and are therefore super useful to create ownership over a broad range of designed things.

This could be used as backgrounds, used to create distinctive shapes, to crop imagery, and provide a broad range of applications that made created assets feel owned.

We wanted to aim for something that could be customised almost infinitely but be used by anyone working with us – like a programmatic approach for creating a diverse set of patterns that still all felt connected.

After some early stabs at this (see above), our wonderful designer Tom Hyde came up with a clever answer to this challenge. Our business is speech, and we found inspiration in the human body – the mouth. It is where our voices stem from and animators will know that there are a small number of shapes it makes when annunciating different sounds and words. This is universal across languages – our mouths make a finite number of shapes when speaking, regardless of what comes out.

We knew we needed to abstract away from making the mouth shape too biological or realistic (trust me, it gets a bit weird), and so we ended up with 8 abstract shapes:

These can then be combined – taking one shape in the foreground and a second shape offset and rotated with different blend effects added. From these 8 shapes, we can then create an unlimited number of patterns:

We can also use our colour palette and various opacity effects to add further variation to these lines.

When used in its fill variant, the foreground shape is made to match the background, with the colour emerging in steps towards the background shape. This reflects what Speechmatics does – take invisible audio and turn it into written legible text.

The visible from the invisible.

Above are the complete Echoes, but of course we can also crop and zoom in on these to creates textures and backgrounds.

These 8 shapes and variety of fill options plus our colour palette can be combined almost infinitely, just as a relatively small number of words can be combined to convey a huge variety of different ideas and thoughts.

Our Echo then reflects human communication, and both evokes sound waves and the evolution of language. It feels organic, natural, asymmetrical. It looks familiar for a company working in speech, but isn’t simply a randomly generated sound wave or speech bubble.

It is also an enormous helpful tool from a brand perspective, giving us a way to make other assets like photos and imagery feel own and congruent with each other.

Ultimately our Echo forms an important backbone to much our visual design, given us a flexible, easy-to-use tool to make almost anything feel uniquely Speechmatics.

Fonts

Fonts convey personality, but have other objectives too, like accessibility or flexibility. We chose two fonts – a display and body font, that between them reinforced out objectives with the brand.

In this instance, we spent a lot of time browsing, and mocking up various taglines to see what felt right. This was an art, not a science. We tried a lot of variations, with a strong gut reaction to almost all of them (either good or bad).

Our display font is now PP Telegraf:

For our body font we chose DM Sans. This gives us a nice mix between a premium font and something more widely available for things like presentations and collateral the team will create themselves.

DM Sans benefits from enormous flexibility through its breadth of styles and weights. It supports the display of 476 languages and is widely available – this is a huge help for us creating consistency across our various owned assets, including our ads, our portal, documentation, and presentations.

They also look fantastic together:

Our logo

Our logo was by far the toughest nut to crack in this process. We created hundreds and hundreds of ideas, refining some before ditching them.

All the above ideas are now confined to history. I have to say I do not miss them, and love where we ended up. If you look closely, you might be able to see some concepts that ultimately inspired our final direction.

None jumped out though. When you know you know, you know? After many many dead ends, we went back to our current logo and explored how we might evolve it rather than start afresh.

Two elements stood out – the left-hand side, which symbolises a speech mark, and the central point, which is a circle.

We then adapted both.

The speech mark is a globally understood way to depict speech in written form. Though this has many different forms in different fonts and languages, we loved the symbolism here. But how to avoid the obvious? We took it, simplified it and abstracted it.

The second part, the circle, was too common in our research to ignore. From the Gothic patterns of Cambridge’s University buildings to the patterns created on circular Chladni plates, back to our mission to think globally in our language coverage. Circles were simply too common in our research to ignore.

We then brought these two elements together:

Creating our final logo marque.

This gave us something abstract that works well on its own and with our brand name, that could be used at various sizes (remember many will only see our logo in the top left of a web page, or even a tab on a browser).

A couple of additional impressions of this marque that I enjoy – the first is that with its tilt it feels as it is moving – giving the sense of dynamism (shared by language itself) and that it may be a cog in a much larger machine, just as an API is a piece of a larger technology stack.

The two sides of the logo also have a pleasing duality to them. The upper left side is asymmetrical and reflect the more natural, organic side of what we do. The spoken word and language are not precise, or mathematical. All languages have irregularities in them. The bottom right side however reflect the exactness of science and the machine – this is the technological, technical, scientific aspect of what we do.

Our marque is abstract and avoids the trappings of anything too speech-y or sound-y. It feels modern, futuristic even. I also personally think it’s quite cool.

As well as our marque, we also adapted our written logo format too, opting for the Gotham font for its premium and authoritative feel, adding some additional touches to the individual characters to make it feel owned.

In the above, we took the angle contained in the logo marque on the left and used this to edit the ‘S’, T, and ‘C’ – the latter of which we also changed to be a perfect circle to feel connected to the marque. Even small flourishes like these make a widely available font feel more tailored and unique.?

Photography and illustration

Our old brand lent heavily on illustration. In our update we wanted to bring two things to the forefront – real world scenarios, and more UI elements to represent our product, both in our portal and how it might be used by our customers.

This was important for us because APIs can often feel intangible and abstract to almost everyone other than engineers. Speechmatics is used by products across multiple industries and our end outputs (often captions) have been seen by literally millions and millions of people. We wanted this to come across by bringing to life both our users, and also our end users - those that see our captions, subtitles, meeting summaries and more.

Photography – here we have a rich vein of imagery to draw from. Our customers themselves and their businesses, but also the dozens of industries and use cases in which Speechmatics has been used. From live sports events, contact centres, and healthcare settings, to live events, podcast and (social) media production, Speechmatics powers a huge range of speech technology.

Illustration – over the last couple of years, our portal has become the place where customers and prospects evaluate the power of Speechmatics. With a recent project to uplift its UI using the Radix design system, our website can now use shared components but also showcase what it’s like to use Speechmatics (which can be unusual for an API service). We created a system to create images that pull these together depending on the context.

Tone of Voice

Tone of Voice was something completely new as part of this project – no solid guidelines existed before, and it felt like the perfect time to introduce them.

Our Tone of Voice principles also stem from our descriptors, but obviously one cannot write in a ‘premium’ tone of voice, so needed to be adapted for this purpose.

Our Tone of Voice principles therefore are:

• Authoritative - We’re the experts in our field. We are the dedicated subject-matter experts, whose focus has enabled us to stay ahead. We have the confidence to make bold, truthful claims, and let the strength of that message land on its own merits. ?We don’t have to overexplain, and should always be clear and concise.
• Educational - The best way to be educational is to be engaging. We love sharing insight into how we achieve our results, build our product, and think about the future of technology. ?We find ways to tell interesting stories, using analogies and metaphors to explain complex concepts, without sacrificing the truth of our message.
• Conscientious - If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. We may make confident claims, but we’ve run the numbers, and have the facts on our side.? For us, a commitment to inclusivity is central to our mission to Understand Every Voice. We build our technology and perform rigorous testing that makes sure it can accurately transcribe as large an audience as possible. Our writing should share this inclusive approach.

We also introduced a brand persona – the tool used to imagine if you were writing as a single person that represented the brand. For us this means Professor Brian Cox or Dr Hannah Fry.

These are experts in their field, and with a passion in helping the wider public share in that passion.

They use stories and engaging insight to spread that message. They wrap facts, data, and insight up with stories, metaphor, and analogies, without sacrificing their commitment to truthfulness.

They bring their subject matter to the level of the audience without dumbing it down completely. They start simple and build up to complexity. They understand that their audience needs to be taken on a journey, as they are not as familiar with their subject.

They can be light-hearted and humorous but would never use crass language or base humour. They are not silly. They use wit, but don’t crack gags.

A persona is a nice short hand for those not immersed in the ToV all the time - we love having the wider team contribute to our writing, so for them it is easier to channel a persona than have a crib sheet of principles next to them.

This Tone of Voice, combined with our visuals, reinforce our position as forward-thinking, ever evolving experts in our field. We may have made some huge technical breakthroughs, but we’re not done by any means. In that journey we want to share our passion and learnings from the cutting-edge, and welcome people to be a part of the journey we’re on.

Bringing these together

These various elements come together to form our new brand, which we are very proud of.

In these we lean into the full colours of our brand – in reality we will likely save applications like this for adverts, slides, and occasions where we really need to stand out.

You can see our ‘dark mode’ version here at the bottom centre. We’ve not lent into this too much for now – not because we don’t like it (we love it), but we have plans as to where we might use this most effectively and in a more deliberate manner. Watch this space.?

In the above you can also see an additional branded element – our highlight. We use this to draw attention to key phrases and add further personality to our headings.

Below you can see a screenshot of our website, where we’ve lent more heavily into using UI components in the three-card layout:

For our events, we wanted our technology to be the star of the show as well, so we stripped back much of the design, and instead emphasised the screens which showcase our demos, as well as adding two additional mounts for iPads to show additional demos and information.

Our business cards also strike a balance between using whitespace on one side, and colour and warmth on the details side:

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There is a great deal of flexibility that we’ve ended up with, where we can create a lot of different layouts, designs and convey different messages to different audiences, whilst always reinforcing our descriptors.

I feel that our design feels clean and modern without feeling cold and detached from human interaction and communication. The various elements come together to create something unique and differentiated in our space, but also a look that still feels as if it truly belongs in the world of AI.

Let's hope it lands well in the real world.

Some thanks

We very much see this as the beginning of a new chapter, and not the end of a journey. Speechmatics has a truly incredible product, built on years of technical innovation. We hope now that the external brand reflects just how unique this offering is, and the difference it can make in the lives of our end users.

I also need to stress that this has been a huge team effort. The best creative work happens in groups, and we’ve had a great group. Thanks to my brand team (the Toms) – Thomas Hyde , Tom Young , they have been cheery, hardworking, and endless dedicated to getting this huge project done.

A particular mention must go to Thomas Hyde . I’m one of those annoying brand people who lacks almost any design ability, so almost everything you see here came from his pen. He has been, as ever, relentlessly upbeat and positive, endlessly willing to iterate and try out new stuff, and tirelessly thorough and conscientious. I loved working with him at Peak, and I've loved working through this here. That man is a wonder.

Thanks to the senior folk at Speechmatics that help guide this throughout – Lauren King , Katy Wigdahl , Will Williams , Trevor Back , Ricardo Herreros-Symons , and David Agmen-Smith – thanks for your inputs. Thanks too to our agency help without whom the execution phase would have been overwhelming – Tone Agency: Design on Demand and Blazity . Thanks to Pete Mo for lending us a creative ear and keeping us on track with Radix and using a design system. Thanks to the wider DevX team for updating our website demos (with portal coming soon). And finally, a big shout out to the wider marketing team here at Speechmatics.

I hope this has been useful - it's great to make a record of just how many decisions have gone into this.

I hope that you enjoy the new brand too.

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