Validin is a data research and validation tool designed for cybersecurity professionals.

The team at Validin approached Bend with a branding problem. Not only was the current brand not grounded in strategy, it did not have a cohesive story and brand essence. There was an opportunity to better position Validin in the industry, honing in on the target customer and their pain points.

The goal of the project was to establish a compelling and unified brand identity that effectively communicates how Validin helps organizations manage their data better and position the company as a trusted partner for security professionals. We wanted to foster increased brand recognition, customer engagement, and market share growth.

The first thing we set out to do is to identify key personas that embodied Validin’s ideal customer profile. Through interviews with the CEO and founder, Kenneth Kinion, and his sales consultant, we established that we’d be targeting threat researchers and security analysts. We also did a competitive analysis to establish industry trends and identify how we could differentiate ourselves.

Now the fun part. With the appropriate background and understanding of the competitive landscape and who we were targeting, it was time to dream up how to express the brand.

We presented four unique mood boards to the founding team, all leaning on concepts from our initial design discovery — igniting the curiosity of discovery, bringing back the fun in security, and the propensity of the user to enjoy playing detective. While none of those mood boards were “it”, they fostered a great discussion and by the second round we had a solid direction that spoke to finding patterns in the noise, ordering chaos, and filtering out the irrelevant.

We now had to nail down the logo. After 28 logos and 5 rounds, we found “the one”. Leaning into the idea of finding patterns in the noise and discovering something that is not initially present, the new Validin logo uses a simple and smart (if we don’t say so ourselves) wordmark using negative space to spell out the brand name.

With a solid brand concept and essence in hand, it was time to bring the brand identity to life across a broader scale. This included the website, sales presentations, product dashboard, business cards, and swag. And then of course putting together the brand guidelines with rules and suggestions to ensure that the brand can be used consistently as Validin grows and expands their team.

We all know that establishing a brand is one thing, but you need to partner with teams who have commitment to brand consistency to really make it shine. Kenneth Kinion, CEO of Validin, is exactly that kind of partner. Together, we made sure that the brand was fully transitioned and used across the customer journey at warp speed. You’ll see the brand expressed in sales materials, on the website, all the way through to the customer dashboard.