HubSpot is an American software company for marketing, sales, and customer service automation. Its products and services provide businesses with a set of tools for CRM, social media marketing, content management, lead generation, web analytics, search engine optimization, and customer support.
HubSpot was created in 2006 by friends Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, who met while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The friends decided to change the usual approach to marketing, which at that time was no longer working. For this purpose, they adopted the strategy of inbound marketing.
The initial stage of HubSpot development largely contributed to the investment of one of its founders, Dharmesh Shah, who invested in it more than $ 500,000 in personal funds. The company started developing incredibly fast, and between 2007 and 2010, the company’s annual revenue grew from 255 thousand USD to more than 15 million USD.
In 2010, Halligan and Shah wrote a book called “Engaging Marketing,” in which they talked about the strategy they used and the history of HubSpot’s creation and development. Also in 2010, HubSpot bought Oneforty and released new software that can personalize websites for different groups of visitors.
In August 2014, HubSpot conducted an IPO. In 2016, the company opened its academy with free digital marketing courses, which more than 400,000 people have successfully completed.
From the company’s inception until 2021, HubSpot’s CEO position was held by one of its founders, Brian Halligan. In 2021, he moved to the position of CEO, and Yamini Rangan took the CEO’s chair at HubSpot.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is the name of an American company that provides a cloud-based platform for marketing and sales. The company offers comprehensive applications to help identify potential customers and conduct social marketing.
In terms of visual identity, HubSpot is a very consistent and stable company. Its original logo, designed in 2006, was only slightly refined in 2016, keeping all the original elements and the core idea untouched. The badge only got more modern and its color palette — was deeper and more interesting.
The original HubSpot logo was introduced in 2006 and stayed unchanged for more than ten years. It was a modern sans-serif logotype in a creative font with rounded shapes of the characters and straight cuts of the bars. The lettering was set in the title case with the “H” and “S” capitalized, and the “O” replaced by a symbol, called Sprocket. The Sprocket is an orange ring (the “O”) with three straight lines, coming out of it to different sides. Each line has a small sphere on its end. The orange emblem was complemented by small white strokes of the spheres, which added volume, and a dark gray shade of the wordmark.
The redesign of the HubSpot logo, held in 2016, has played with the color palette of the badge, switching gray to obsidian, and turning bright orange into a smoother coral one. Another thing about the redesign was in the Sprocket: it was now absolutely flat, and its contours were refined so that the sphere on the longest ray is now placed directly above the negative space of the “P”. The circles in the negative space of the three letters in the wordmark got redrawn and now boast a perfect geometric shape.
The bold and stable lettering from the primary HubSpot badge is set in a modern sans-serif typeface with rounded shapes of the characters and clean straight cuts of the lines. The closest fonts to the one, used in this insignia, are, probably, Urbancat RG Bold, or Noopla Bold, with some minor modifications of the characters’ contours.
As for the color palette of the HubSpot visual identity, it is based on a sleek and strong combination of obsidian-gray and coral-pink, which looks very dynamic and progressive, and makes the brand stand out in the list of its competitors.