DashlaneCopied

Dashlane, founded in 2009, is a password and identity manager that fills in passwords, contact and billing details so users do not have to remember them. The name reflected the idea of keeping traffic moving on a congested internet. Its old logo combined a shield, the standard trope of security software, with a leaping antelope for the dashing of Dashlane. For its tenth birthday the company launched what it billed as a head-to-toe update, designed by a Pentagram team led by partner Eddie Opara, Creative Bloq and AIGA Eye on Design reported.

The new mark is a monogram, the 'Dashlane D', made from dash-like rounded shapes. Pentagram said the dashes are building blocks for the whole system, evoking mobile screens, autofilling form fields and lanes on the information superhighway, and that the identity plays with revealing and concealing: even when you cannot see Dashlane, it is there. Chief marketing officer Joy Howard said the company helps customers reveal and conceal themselves and their data. Creative Bloq found the D unexciting standing still but effective in motion, and abstract enough to work as a pattern.

The typeface became GT Walsheim, which Dashlane said moved it from an overly tech-forward feel to something warmer and more human. The palette centres on a dark green with a complementary pink; Dashlane said its colours resist becoming bright or flashy because the last thing it wants is to get in users' way. In login boxes and form fields, a small dark green D replaced the blue antelope, while alert colours stayed red.

Creative Bloq judged the palette not the most attractive but distinctive and functional, and the identity far more effective than the old one.

Dashlane's own explainer was aimed at nervous users. Everything would work as before, it said; the difference was that in login boxes and form fields people would see a small dark green D instead of the blue impala. Alert colours stayed red so warnings still read as warnings, while icons became bolder and friendlier and typefaces warmer and lighter. The internet, it said, was even more frustrating than at the 2009 launch, and the brand should point to a radically easier one. Keeping the red alerts is the detail that shows real product thinking behind the logo.

Ditching the shield was the right call; every security brand owns one. The dash D is clever in animation and almost invisible as a static icon, which for a tool meant to disappear into forms might be exactly right.