The Shockingly Simple Rebrand

Here’s the thing. The e-commerce checkout industry has never been so crowded. It’s an ever-growing universe of blues, purples, and the occasional green. And 99% of these brands are doing and saying the exact same thing. It is what we like to call the sea of sameness. Bolt’s difference is simple, one-click checkout. So we wanted to build a brand that communicated this in every aspect, while freeing merchants and their shoppers from the confines of the e-commerce status quo. All this came together through the concept of “Shockingly Simple.” This idea became the blueprint for the Bolt brand.

Press:
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FastCompany UnderConsideration itsnicethat CreativeBloq Front&Center ZacharyWinterton CreativeBoom CreativeReview

Accolades:
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Fast Company best branding of 2023

See the full brand guidelines

The logo

Our new logo is the cornerstone of the rebrand. We paid attention to every detail. First, it had to stand out as unique, ownable, and bold. The color palette must live in a space that is untouched in our industry. Our logo must be scalable to any size and be able to fit into the product. It was important within the logo was a shorthand version, an icon if you will. But, on the other side of the spectrum it had to convey security and trust to our merchants and their shoppers. And lastly, it had to be able to flex from expressive to recessive, because often we are the ingredient brand to our merchants.

Electric Dynamism

We created a distinct art direction style to be used in our photography and illustrations. We call this style “Electric Dynamism.” It conveys the excitement of One-Click Checkout through dramatic wide angle forced perspective, energetic movement, and a slight surreality that plays off of metaphors of Bolt value props. It’s built out of our color palette, and meant to mimic the momentum and instantaneity of our product experience in a shockingly refreshing way.

We also teamed up with the talented Jack Fletcher as our sole adjunct illustrator.

Boltify everything

No detail is too small. We created a dynamic design system that uses expressive and recessive lightning shapes. We also created our own font built from Agrandir. Among this typeface were customized special character. Because of all this we are able to instill the Bolt brand in everything touch point no matter the placement.

Where it all comes together

All the details finally come together on a complete refresh of Bolt.com. We started from scratch, designing and writing it from the ground up.

The design community noticed

We absolutely loved that all the small details didn’t go unnoticed.

It was also an honor to be asked by Arthur Foliard, Creative Director at Koto Studios, to join The Follow-up podcast. It was a humbling experience to be part of a podcast I’ve followed for years.

Listen here