Stripe is a financial services and software as a service company. Its best-known products include payment processing software and APIs that are used by a wide range of online shops and other e-commerce sites, not to mention mobile applications. The history of the company started in 2009. Two years later, the co-founders, John and Patrick Collison, obtained investment of $2 million.
The name of the company alludes to the stripe on a credit or debit card. Unlike the majority of logotypes of commercial organizations, the Stripe logo consists of only the name of the brand. Why did the designers use such an approach and how did they add a personal touch?
What is Stripe
Stripe is a financial service company whose software is used by a wide range of online businesses to accept money over the internet. As of 2021, the company has 2500 employees. It has headquarters in San Francisco, California and Dublin, Ireland.
The 2009 Stripe design was just their company’s name written in turquoise lowercase letters. The font was a usual sans-serif style and a lot like the one they used since 2016, but with visible distinctions.
The logo is as simple as just the name of the brand. There is no emblem or any other pictorial element to be seen, which could have made the design more recognizable. While proud owners of typographical logos often make up for the lack of the emblem by using a highly decorative, recognizable type, this is not the case here. The brand’s design team opted for a font featuring a rather classic style.
Although there might be a few unusual details, the overall look of the wordmark doesn’t make it in any way recognizable. It seems to be more about being serious and meaning business – something that is pretty valuable when it comes to dealing with money. Eventually, quite a few banks and other types of companies dealing with finance also stick to this approach.
That said, we should also mention that there are several unique details adding at least some recognizablility if not making the logo stand out. The most notable of them is the color, a vivid fusion of blue and purple, which is rarely found in the logos of the company’s competitors.
If you take a closer look, you’ll notice a couple of unusual details in the typeface of the Stripe logo. For instance, the top of the “t” and the dot above the “i” feature diagonal lines, which makes them different from the dominating pattern. These small strokes are supposed to be the reference to the original name, /dev/payments, which was used when the project was part of the Ycombinator program. The diagonal lines were inspired by the slashes seen in the original mark.
In addition to this, they are meant to emphasize that Stripe is a tech company as slashes are widely used in computer coding and file names.
The logo can be used in three color versions. The primary logo showcases a vibrant combination of blue and purple, which has been often called blurple (and this is how the company’s design team calls its).
Additionally, there are white and slate variations, which are used on dark and light backgrounds respectively.
Apparently, the type used for the wordmark is a customized one as it doesn’t seem to exactly coincide with any of popular existing typefaces. That said, we must mention that it bears some similarity to FF Fago Black, which comes from the FF Fago family developed by German designer Ole Schäfer in 2000. While this ready-made type doesn’t have the characteristic “t” with its shortened bar, and the top of the “r” is more angular there, the proportions of the letters are similar to those of the glyphs in the Stripe logo