The Stream Design Team is thrilled to unveil our refreshed brand identity, marking a monumental milestone for our growing company and reinforcing our unwavering commitment to providing our customers with the best experience possible at every touch point.
“Stream’s sleek new logo represents the company’s evolution to becoming an icon for developer empowerment and high-quality components.” — Jared Laham, Design Director.
Why the Change?
Over the past 10 years, Stream has grown significantly as a company and industry leader in real-time communication APIs. Stream has evolved so much that for some time now, it’s been clear our image no longer reflects who the company is and the brighter future we want to create. In 2023, the executive team embarked on this exciting brand refresh journey to authentically reflect Stream’s significant success and scale.
How Did We Approach Our Refresh?
A brand refresh is a process of updating a brand's image, identity, and communication to keep it relevant and competitive in a changing market. The goal is to modernize the brand while maintaining its core identity and strategy so customers don’t get lost. Instead, they can follow the breadcrumbs between the legacy branding and the newly refreshed one.
"It should feel like a clear evolution, not a revolution." — Jared Laham, Design Director.
After many deep strategic and inspiring creative review sessions of visuals with Stream stakeholders, Stream’s internal design team had everything they needed to explore various strong brand directions. Each direction pushed the boundaries of the current brand to a place that felt right until we refined this brand direction to feel perfect.
Introducing Stream’s New Brand Identity
This refreshed brand aesthetic conveys our dynamism, vigor, speed, and how beautiful form can be created using module geometric elements.
The Logo
At the heart of the brand identity, the new logo is a clear evolution of its predecessor. Stream’s design team first focused on balancing and refining the logotype until it felt bold and modern.
“Our design team really exhausted every creative option in order to nail down such a comprehensive brand refresh. We were all drawn to the power that this new logo mark brought and how it felt like a clear upgrade for Stream, while still holding onto our roots.” — Ally Wieger, Senior Marketing Designer.
Building on the wordmark's visual language, we also refreshed the Stream brand mark — the ship, a centerpiece which the whole identity system sails further than the previous logo could. This brand mark represents our product ethos. Stream builds high-quality components so engineers can build world-class apps faster. The mechanics of the logo blend the geographical features from our two main office locations, the Amsterdam canal boats, and the Colorado mountains, and simple geometric triangular shapes that feel like isometric device screens. This ship symbol appears across the identity as a standalone element, in logotypes, diagrams, and as a hero 3D version, providing a unified and integrated experience.
We have relied on the iconic Inter font but were previously applying it to our messages with significantly thicker weights that, at worst, felt clumsy and, at best, shouty. So our team re-evaluated how we wanted our tone of voice to sound and, after many explorations, felt that a thinner weight for our headlines would speak well and match our simplified design aesthetic.
The Typeface
We have relied on the iconic Inter font but were previously applying it to our messages with significantly thicker weights that, at worst, felt clumsy and, at best, shouty. So our team re-evaluated how we wanted our tone of voice to sound and, after many explorations, felt that a thinner weight for our headlines would speak well and match our simplified design aesthetic.
The Colors
Our color systems took inspiration directly from the Northern Lights. This powerful, unseen global force connects, electrifies, and captivates the skies for over a billion people at a time, much like our APIs. By using our legacy main color, Stream Blue, as the starting point, we were able to pair our secondary and tertiary palettes around it easily to bring a better sense of balance and tone.
The Iconography
As we recently launched our Video and Audio API, we saw an opportunity to better differentiate all our product iconography while keeping them feeling like a product family and helping users visually navigate. So, we updated our product icons, taking opportunities to share similar proportions between them to help increase their impact and consistency as a set.
What’s Next for Stream’s Brand
Our website has already been refreshed with a new look and feel.
"This brand refresh is a true reflection of Stream’s evolution, ambition and trajectory. It visually embodies Stream’s quality through high-value visual techniques and timeless simplicity.” — Douglas Hawkins, Senior Designer.
Over the next few weeks, you will see all other visuals around Stream aligning with this new direction in our marketing materials and products.