Brand Identity
Retain.
Retain. Branding
Creative Direction & Execution // Karli Lundquist
TL;DR
SaaS branding has a sameness problem with geometric, cold, and forgettable branding. Retain. needed to stand apart. Starting from scratch, I built a brand identity that brought a human touch to a tech product without losing the credibility that space demands.
The Brief
Retain. is a startup SaaS company building retention tools for businesses. They needed a foundational brand identity, logo, visual language, and guidelines that could hold up as the company grew. The challenge was finding a design direction that felt fresh and approachable without wandering outside the professional expectations of the B2B tech space.
The Problem
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A Sea of Sameness
SaaS brands default to geometric shapes, cool palettes, and tech-forward aesthetics. Standing out meant breaking from those conventions without looking out of place in the category.
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Human Product, Cold Category
Retain.'s entire value proposition is about human connection and keeping people engaged. The brand needed to reflect warmth, approachability, and personality, all without sacrificing professional credibility.
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Name as Identity
The name "Retain." needed to immediately communicate purpose. Every design decision had to reinforce what the product does, not just look good alongside it.
The Approach
I started with a competitive audit, studying how other SaaS brands positioned themselves visually and where the white space was. The pattern was clear: everyone was zigging in the same direction. The opportunity was to zag without losing the plot.
The central creative decision was a hand-drawn underline as a core brand element. In a category full of rigid geometry, a hand-drawn mark reads immediately as human; it's imperfect by design, and that imperfection is the point. The underline became a flexible device that tied key visuals together while signaling that this was a brand built around people, not just software.
Typography and color followed the same logic. Modern sans-serif for clarity and professional credibility, offset by an optimistic, vibrant palette that pushed against the muted tones that dominate the category. The system was designed to feel cohesive from the logo down to the smallest brand touch point.
The Work
The Outcome
Retain. launched with a complete brand identity — logo, typography system, color palette, and guidelines that were built to scale as the company grew. The hand-drawn underline became the signature element that made the brand immediately recognizable and distinct from anything else in the category.
The result was a brand that felt like it belonged in the SaaS space without disappearing into it. Retain. is professional enough to earn trust, but human enough to be remembered.