Deputy’s Brand — A New Era of Thriving Workplaces

by Lisi Schappi, 4 minutes read
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Despite working at Deputy for almost a decade, I haven’t written much on our blog. I’m less of a wordsmith, and more of the pixel pusher/visual type. That’s why I lead design at Deputy.

Over the past six months, we’ve been working on our most inspiring design project to date — a brand refresh. That refresh includes a new logo, colour palette, illustration style, and an overall fresh visual identity to reflect our new mission, vision, and values.

A sparkly new look across all of Deputy

Why a brand refresh? Along with the world of work, we’ve evolved a lot as a company over the past 12 years. We’ve shifted our focus from building solutions for business owners to creating experiences which make shift work simple and more enjoyable for everyone.

We had been thinking about our brand for a while, but 2020 really put things into perspective. We felt that we really needed to create a brand that reflects how our core values and vision have evolved. And, importantly, a brand that resonates with all of the diverse people we support globally. This journey began with rethinking our logo.

Say hello to Spark, our new logo mark

Our previous star logo was part of Deputy for the past 12 years. And while sometimes change, both internally and externally, means saying goodbye, it also makes room for improvement.

As we thought about those 12 years — and where we are now and where we want to be in the next several decades — we felt that star no longer served its purpose. At the outset, we wanted to design a new logo which feels less authoritative and more welcoming, intuitive, and trusted.

We wanted a logo that represented us — and you.

Our community of more than 250,000 workplaces has a special kind of spark that fuels innovation, creativity, and collaboration. This energy — this spark —drives passion and thriving workplaces.

You’ve seen the spark. For you, it might be shining an open sign on your business for the first time. For your store, it might be the store manager who implements new health and safety precautions. For your team, it might be the waitress who goes the extra mile to deliver an enjoyable meal. And for us at Deputy, it’s the opportunity to provide businesses and teams with tools to simplify shift work.

Our new logo not only reflects one individual’s spark. It represents all of the people who come together to create a thriving workplace. We believe our new logo is simple yet meaningful, and it reflects our passion for collaboration and inclusivity.

Our brand is more than just our logo

To accompany our sparkly logo, we’ve created a vibrant colour palette to replace our Deputy blue. We love blue — so much so we painted our office doors blue. But we think one of the best ways we can express our unique personality, and help you find things in our product, is with a more expansive, accessible colour palette.

We’re excited to introduce our new brand colours Azure, a royal purple and Spark, a lively peach. We think they go together like peaches and cream — they’re simply scrumptious, playful, and sophisticated.

Our logomark looks sensational in peach, but also looks fabulous in lilac, cobalt, mint and burgundy. That’s why we crafted an expansive secondary colour palette. To not only help Spark embrace their colourful personality, but to help us create more enjoyable, intuitive experiences for all of our users. With our new colours, we’ve improved the accessibility of all our apps, meaning our users with visual impairments will find our apps easier to use.

Representing thriving workplaces, in every community

Our passion for diversity, equity, and inclusion is reflected not only in our expansive colour palette but also in our new illustrations. We love the fact that our customers are from communities all around the world, so we’re on a mission to make sure all of our illustrations reflect the diverse, thriving workplaces we support. We drew inspiration from the people who use our apps (nurses, bartenders, and store managers, to name a few) to create a more colourful, expressive, and relatable illustration style.

Our brand not only reflects the fun team working behind the scenes on our tools, but it represents anyone who uses Deputy. And we’d love to hear your feedback.

Our logo, the Deputy Spark, shows that when you bring together three core elements — business owners, managers and teams — you get a spark.