Case 02 of 04 · HashiCorp · 2025
Re-building the HashiCorp brand system after acquisition by IBM
Problem + Context
HashiCorp’s acquisition finalized in April 2025, but the brand didn’t nest naturally into IBM’s product suite. I led the rebuild of its core expression, keeping the brand intact while making it far more flexible and properly documented, an evolution that set us on target for $1B ARR in 2026. Most of the work centered on the colors and treatments of the core expressions, solving pre-existing problems:
HashiCorp’s identity was tied directly to its products. As a parent company it had no universal voice, it was primarily a shell for Terraform and Vault. The old color system below shows the complete lack of any actual brand agnostic considerations.
Products retained their primary color, with a new complete palette that clearly harkens back to the products while allowing greater flexibility. Equidistant steps from light to dark allowed us to rebuild all our pre-existing assets with the same treatments. Infographics, decks, socials, key art, and web presence could now be totally unified.
The biggest challenge that this update had to solve was making the brand visualizations feel consistent across print/digital light and dark. IBM’s design system required us to operate on light, where we had positioned to be an on dark brand previously. Building out a color suite with pre-determined stops for gradients that we would commonly use allowed the brand to feel consistent across both spaces, while passing AAA WCAG for web and maintaining clarity when printed on light.
The difference in consistency in our customer journey was night and day. While the brand still has space to continue to evolve, there’s clear reliable direction that designers could easily understand and implement. Most assets translated cleanly into the new color system, but some required more thoughtful rebuilds as we’d encountered problems in using them over the past few months.
In Situ
The final treatments and palette were added to a figma library containing all of our logos for Partners, Product, ERG, and Events. This file with over 1200 components became our source of truth for all design materials, expediting production by at least 20%. The brand team noted how easy it became to build out the majority of requests when we no longer had to guess on what was appropriate or not.