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Cloudflare turned six on 27 September 2016 and marked it with a new brand and marketing website. Thai tech site TechTalkThai, covering the anniversary week, put the logo news first: Cloudflare had changed its logo, now flatter and newer, alongside the opening of its 100th data centre and new enterprise traffic products.

On the company blog, Cloudflare admitted that next to the other news a new brand seemed almost frivolous, but said it wanted to follow its own advice and never stick with something just because it felt comfortable. It redesigned the logo, updated the typography and changed what had become a pesky capital F in the middle of its name, aiming to be more streamlined, more scalable and more appealing.

The old logo, the company wrote, stood out and reflected its personality, but cloud logos had become common and the old mark was complex and hard to reproduce on t-shirts, signs and stickers. Even a flat version had never satisfied the design team. The new logo keeps the Cloudflare orange and yellow, keeps a flare in the centre to represent how the network responds in real time, and keeps the essential shapes of the cloud. The blocky, rounded capitals of the old wordmark gave way to lettering in which the C and F were made slightly larger, and CloudFlare officially became Cloudflare. The company also thanked the journalists who had always got the name right.

An expanded palette and gradients were added for the many diagrams the marketing team draws to explain how the internet works.

The post put the brand inside a busy week. Cloudflare counted more than four million customers, described levelling the internet playing field as its mission, and listed the launches around the anniversary: three encryption releases the week before, the 100th city in its data centre network the day before, and early access to dedicated SSL certificates, cloud load balancing and traffic management to come. It said the team's work since 2010 deserved a signal that it was evolving too. Launching a logo in the middle of a product blitz is the right instinct for an infrastructure company: the brand is the footnote, not the headline.

This is the right kind of evolution for infrastructure. Cloudflare's guiding principle, it said, was not to screw up something good, and it did not. The simplified cloud reproduces cleanly, the colours carry the recognition, and dropping the camel case quietly signalled a company that had outgrown its webmaster origins.