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1Password began rolling out a refreshed brand on 20 April 2023. In a long post, the company said it was still the same 1Password founded by four friends in Ontario, but that its customer base had grown to millions of people and more than 100,000 businesses, and its visual identity needed to reflect the many ways the product fits into life at home and at work. It also wanted to change the conversation about security: less scare tactics, more capabilities and possibilities. The work was done in house by its creative and product design teams.

The core structural move was separation. The old 1Password logo had done double duty as both product and company mark. To diversify its products, the company wanted to distinguish the two, so it built a new company logo while explicitly keeping the app icon, the browser icon and the vault unlock animation unchanged. The keyhole became the focal point: the lock was taken out of the wordmark and placed at the front of the logo, and the name was reset in a bespoke typeface, Agile Sans, described as friendly and trustworthy with a dash of quirkiness. The palette was adjusted rather than replaced, with a slightly desaturated, denim like Bits Blue, a richer Intrepid Blue navy and a beige called Biscuit.

The emotional idea is a portal of possibilities: an animation in which the lock opens and multicoloured rings burst out, meant to capture the feeling, as users describe it, that autofill is a bit like magic. Photography moves to fly on the wall scenes of real customers. Chief executive Jeff Shiner's line, quoted in the post, captures the stance: people do not say they need to authenticate with Zoom, they say they need to get on their Zoom call.

Design Compass, reviewing the refresh in May, read the split between company and app icon as a strategy to keep trust in the product while making room for new services, and said leaving the heritage app icon alone was the right call. It found the reversal of security's usual visual grammar, solid walls and metal replaced by a door opening onto a portal, a cool challenge.

It is a mature piece of brand housekeeping. Keeping the icon people tap every day while giving the company a separate, flexible mark is exactly how a single product firm prepares to become a platform. The rings and Biscuit beige are pleasant if predictable signs of a tech brand going soft. The real test will be whether the new company mark ever earns the recognition of the icon it now stands beside.