The Clueso Brand
Behind-the-scenes of shaping Clueso’s brand identity.
When building software, design isn’t the icing. It is the whole cake.
Every time a user interacts with your product, they’re dealing with pixels. Hovering over a button. Dragging the playhead on the timeline. Clicking export. If those pixels aren’t designed with intention, they feel generic.
And generic is dangerous. Without a brand identity, products slip into sameness. They look like any other app that pulled its UI off the shelf of a component library. They don’t scream quality. They don’t feel like they belong to anyone.
That’s why brand identity matters. It gives pixels direction. It tells you what to emphasize, how to place elements, which colors to use, what typefaces to use, and what tone to strike. All of it adds up to the user’s experience.
And here’s the thing: products can be copied, brands cannot. Two companies can ship the same features, but how they build changes how those features feel. As we scale up as an org, this becomes more apparent.
Let’s dive right in and see how we approached this.
The Origins
The first Clueso logo was born in a San Francisco apartment during Y Combinator. It was designed in just a few hours. At the time, speed mattered more than perfection.
Clueso back then was a simple tool to help users navigate digital products. The first videos were all how-to tutorials. The detective theme felt natural: uncovering clues, guiding users. That’s where the name came from, inspired by Inspector Jacques Clouseau from The Pink Panther.
But as Clueso grew, we needed to think beyond a quick logo. We weren’t just designing a mark. We were building a brand.
That meant stepping back to ask bigger questions: What’s our vision? Where do we want to be as a company? How do we create something that will stay relevant and scale as we grow? To answer these, I had frequent conversations with the founders and the team. The clarity from those conversations helped me see what we could preserve from the origin and what we needed to evolve.
And this is where many teams trip up. When thinking about branding, people often jump straight to the logo. But the logo is just one piece. What really matters is how it evolves across touchpoints. A product is not the same as a brand. A brand can hold multiple products. The brand is the big picture: timeless but relevant, grounded in clarity.
Great companies do this well:
Uber’s vision isn’t about cars. It’s about reimagining the way the world moves.
Airbnb’s vision isn’t about rentals. It’s about belonging anywhere.
Apple doesn’t make apples. Apple is a way of building, and a promise of quality.
That kind of clarity in vision flows into the logo and identity, giving them longevity. It also prevents them from becoming a constraint. If your name and logo are too literal, you box yourself in. But if your identity is broad and aspirational, you give yourself the freedom to grow into new products without needing to rebrand.
Clueso had that luxury. Our name was broad, playful, and non-movable. The origin story gave us roots worth preserving:
Pink: a nod to The Pink Panther, our brand hue.
European roots: Clouseau was European, and European design is known for elegance. That nudged us toward the kind of typography we’d eventually choose.
But we knew our logo didn’t need to over-explain what we do. The best logos don’t. They connect. They make you feel something. That became the challenge: how do we evolve Clueso’s identity into something timeless, scalable, and distinctly ours?
Making it Click
We had been exploring a lot of concepts: transformation, guidance, creation etc. When one idea suddenly clicked:
Clueso = Clue → Solution.
That phrase captured everything we wanted our brand to stand for. We are a company that helps people get from a clue to a solution, and we make that journey feel engaging, like solving a puzzle. You don’t just get the answer handed to you; you feel the joy of solving, of things falling into place.
The serendipity went further. Type “clue” on the emoji keyboard, and the first suggestion is 🧩. Suddenly puzzle pieces were everywhere. And when people see a puzzle, they instantly think of clues, solutions, and progress. The metaphor was perfect.
This made our brand vision sharper: help people reach solutions with clues.
At this stage, we had clarity:
Brand vision: help people reach solutions while having fun.
Concept: puzzle, progress, transformation.
Mark: a visual identity that could scale.
Once the puzzle metaphor clicked, we pushed further. A generic puzzle piece with cavities and extrusions doesn’t always look aesthetic. But puzzles are made of all kinds of pieces. So instead of picking one at random, we explored every possible permutation: cavities, extrusions, flats. We kept going until we found a shape that felt both elegant and systematic.
The puzzle concept wasn’t just a mark anymore. It became a flexible shape system.
Drawing these manually would have been a huge effort, so I built a modular component in Figma to generate permutations. With four edges and three possible states (flat, extrusion, cavity), we landed on 81 possible combinations (80 meaningful ones once you remove the all-flat square).
The interesting part was making sense of them. Each piece could resemble something familiar: arrows, anchors, tickets, kites. But the one with two cavities stood out. It felt like the “last piece of the puzzle,” resonated visually, and became the base shape for our brand.
Crafting the Identity
Once the puzzle concept was set, the next step was refining it into something crisp, balanced, and unmistakably Clueso.
Geometry
We didn’t just want to drop in a plain puzzle piece. It felt static. To bring in motion and progress, we introduced two visual breaks. Rotated 45° clockwise, the shape even resembles a play button. The simple puzzle piece became the base, and we evolved it for elegance and dynamism. It’s a mark that works on its own but also hints at progress and transformation.
Typography
We wanted typefaces that mirrored this balance: clean and modern, but with character. Nohemi and Geist gave us exactly that. Nohemi, sharp, elegant, full of personality, became our choice for titles. Geist, designed by the talented team at Vercel, paired beautifully for paragraphs, approachable and highly legible. Together they gave our identity both presence and warmth.
Colors
Pink remains at our core, but we refined it into a slightly magical pink: vibrant, distinct, but not too loud. Around it, we built a palette that extends across product, marketing, and brand assets, giving us flexibility without losing recognition.
Patterns
Elements from our logo mark made for perfect repeating units, which we used to design seamless patterns. These patterns gave us flexible backgrounds and textures that could scale across posters, screens, and merch, while still feeling distinctly Clueso.
Out in the World
A logomark doesn’t live in a vacuum. It lives on posters, in products, on merch, and sometimes even on a puzzle you put together at a conference table.
We wanted to see the Clueso mark in the wild, to test if it could hold its own across mediums, sizes, and contexts. From 3D renders to laptop stickers, from conference puzzles to billboards, from digital screens to the planter box in our office, the mark stayed distinct, playful, and unmistakably ours.
What started as a single puzzle piece grew into a brand identity that feels at home everywhere.
Not the Last Piece
The logo happens to be the most visible and tangible part of a larger system. The real brand lives in how it makes you feel when it shows up: in the product UI, in a conference puzzle, on a billboard, or even on a planter box in our office.
We are just getting started!
