A brand refresh is one of those things that sounds bigger than it actually is. There's no clean moment of decision. It builds up slowly.
How it happened
A brand refresh is one of those things that sounds bigger than it actually is. There's no clean moment of decision. It builds up slowly. You see your own logo on a slide deck and something feels off. You open your website and realise it's a few years older than the work you're putting through it. Eventually you stop trying to ignore the feeling and you do something about it.
That's pretty much how this one happened.
Where we came from
For a long stretch of Labrys's life, we lived in chaos. The blockchain industry was new, everything was experimental, and the work reflected that. We were almost always working with startups. Brand new ideas, half-formed roadmaps, founders trying to figure out what they were building while we were trying to figure out how to build it. We learned by being inside the noise. The visual identity we had grew out of that environment. Loud, bright, energetic. Fitting for the work and the era.
Where we sit now
That has changed. A lot of what we do now is for established businesses. Teams that already have product, revenue, regulation, and roadmaps in motion. They don't need help inventing the category, they need help moving cleanly inside it. The work has changed with them. Less experimentation. Fewer first-times. More familiar ground, where the value is in knowing how something should be done because we have done it before.
The role we play has shifted too. In the early days we were inside the chaos with our clients. Now we are more often the scalpel. The work tends to show up after someone has already figured out roughly what needs to happen. The job is to cut sharp, in the right place, and not damage the rest of the system on the way through. It rewards experience and precision more than it rewards energy.
We still work with companies dealing with innovation, transformation, and plenty of noise. That part has not gone away. However, we are not expected to play in the noise anymore. We are expected to remove it. To bring some refinement to messy environments and leave a cleaner outcome behind.
The new branding fits where we sit now.
It is quieter. Sharper. More restrained. The colour palette is calmer. The typography is tighter. We took the noise out of the visual identity in the same way we are now expected to take it out of the work.
There isn't much more to it than that. The industry has grown up. Our work has grown up. The brand had to catch up to both. So we tidied it up.