GuardRails

The challenge

Move fast, be safe.

That was GuardRails’ idea from the start. Developers shouldn’t have to choose between shipping quickly and shipping securely. It’s a strong position, and by 2020 the biggest name in the category had adopted almost the same line.

GuardRails had two problems at once. It needed to stand apart from competitors in a market that was growing fast and spending heavily. And it needed to look like a business ready for the next stage: stable, trustworthy, worth investing in.

The existing brand didn’t do either. Quick work was reactive, emergency work had no rules, and every new touchpoint started from scratch.

What we uncovered

Through brand strategy workshops with the founders, we mapped the organisation against the twelve brand archetypes and landed on three that had to work together.

• The Sage as the foundation: GuardRails exists to make its users smarter about security, and positions itself as the authoritative resource
• The Ruler at the core: it sets standards, keeps things safe and takes action rather than waiting
• The Jester as the edge: reviewing code is tedious and stressful, and the brand had permission to make it lighter

The combination mattered more than any one of them. The Ruler keeps the Jester on task. The Jester stops the Ruler from getting bossy. The Sage gives both of them a reason.

We also built out who GuardRails was actually talking to. Three audiences, three different relationships with risk: the security engineer who thinks like an attacker, the developer measured on how fast they ship, and the CISO whose job depends on nothing going wrong. Each needed a different conversation, which later shaped the structure of the website.

One observation from the research carried through everything that followed. The relationship between the user and the product had to sit level. Speak down to developers and the brand reads as superior. Play the sidekick and it reads as optional. The line to hold was assurance, offered when it’s needed.

What we created

The strategy became a system rather than a look.

• A brand strategy guide covering vision, mission, essence, archetypes, personality, values, tone of voice and target audiences
• A one-page brand schematic so the whole organisation could carry the same picture in their head
• A new identity: wordmark, polar bear wordmark and full vertical lockup, with white-outline versions for dark backgrounds
• Nuk, the polar bear mascot, with a story, purpose and social-responsibility angle, giving the Jester somewhere to live
• A colour system anchored on a deep blue, with cream lifting the gradients and a secondary palette tested against real use (the salmon was pulled from calls to action once it read as “don’t click this”)
• Brand elements drawn from the landscape of guardrails and mountains, so the idea of a safe road through hard terrain runs through the artwork
• Templates for the things a remote team produces every week: business cards, letterhead, email signatures, social tiles and a Keynote deck with styled master pages and grid
• A complete brand guidelines document covering replication at every scale
• Website user experience mapping, content hierarchy and page design templates for the three audiences

Tone of voice was rebuilt from the archetypes: factual, informed and confident, with enough positivity to put a developer at ease. The difference shows in a single line. Before: “an application security platform provides a unique blend of scanning capabilities”. After: “seamlessly integrated security expertise for the modern development team”.

The outcome

GuardRails now has a brand that behaves consistently whether it’s a tweet, a sales deck or a job ad, and a set of rules that means quick work no longer has to be reactive.

The identity is live at guardrails.io. Since then the business has been listed in Gartner’s 2023 Market Guide for Continuous Compliance Automation Tools in DevOps and joined the AWS Partner Network.

The project is a good example of a pattern we see often in technology brands. The product is mature, the audience is sophisticated, and the thing missing is a decision about who the brand is. Once that’s made, everything downstream gets easier and faster to produce.