ClearCo

HR tech is a crowded category, and ClearCo's own story had grown harder to tell with every acquisition. HR teams juggling disconnected tools wanted one partner who could make sense of the whole picture, so Focus Lab's strategy work started with the idea the company had been sitting on since it chose its name in 2004: clear. 

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The organization, called ClearCompany at the start of our work together, had already been shortening that name to ClearCo internally, and making that shift official became one of the strategy's early recommendations.

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“Clarity” became the lens every decision had to pass through, starting with one question: What does it look like when hiring, developing, and retaining talent adds up to something bigger, instead of being just another tool? The concept gave ClearCo permission to stop explaining itself in product terms and start speaking to the outcome its customers actually wanted, which was a full, legible view of their people — not another dashboard to manage.

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ClearCo's brand attributes are Mature, Compassionate, and Exciting. Mature, so the brand reads as a dependable authority. Compassionate, because the people using ClearCo carry real weight for their organizations and rarely get credit for it. Exciting, so “mature” never tips into forgettable. Layered against The Guide archetype, the strategy gave ClearCo a steady, dependable presence – a brand equipped to lead people through complexity toward something clear.

ClearCo's previous voice leaned technical, feature-first, and inward-facing – the kind of language that lists what a product does without ever landing on why a customer should care. Sales teams found themselves explaining “talent maximization” more than they were closing on it.

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The new voice runs on three attributes — welcoming, purposeful, and empowering — and leads with outcomes ahead of features.

The brand's new value proposition puts the customer's stakes first: visibility into the entire workforce, the agility to respond quickly, the confidence to decide. Only after that does it describe the platform underneath.

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The new brand story closes on the line that now anchors the whole verbal system: “This is people management the way it should be: Clear.”

ClearCo's mark draws its logic from a Hoberman sphere — a structure that collapses and expands without ever losing its form. Built from a lattice of interlocking shapes, the logomark visually performs the same idea the brand is built on: something that scales with a company, rather than a symbol that only works at one size.

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Early rounds tested denser, more literal versions of the geometry, with more rings, more shapes, and more connection points. The final mark strips that back to seven repeating forms, thick enough to hold their weight at a glance and open enough to read as expansion rather than clutter. 

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The wordmark pairs a confident serif with a clean sans-serif companion, a lockup that lets the logomark carry the concept while the type keeps the name legible and grounded at any scale.

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The color palette takes its cue from metal as a material that connects, conducts, and transforms over time. Copper leads the palette as ClearCo's signature accent: warm, energetic, and distinct in a category that leans hard on cool, corporate blues. A cooler secondary tone, Verdigris, plays on copper's own patina, giving the system a way to signal growth without introducing an unrelated hue. Warm neutrals ground the rest, keeping the palette confident rather than loud.

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For typography, headlines open in a serif, GT Ultra Median, before resolving into a cleaner sans, FT Polar — a visual move from character to clarity within a single line. The same serif appears in quotes and callouts, while FT Polar carries the workhorse copy: body text, captions, and interface language built to stay legible at any size.

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Photography favors an authentic, film-inspired approach with real people, direct eye contact, and moments of visible progress. Marketing iconography borrows the same copper wire motif seen elsewhere in the system. We also defined an illustration style built from metal: three-dimensional objects assembled from layered sheets, set up in a generative AI tool for the ClearCo team.

The system extended past the guidelines and into the materials ClearCo runs on day to day: a presentation template, the Talent Lifecycle Wheel, and an expanded set of marketing icons. Focus Lab also stayed on in a more consultative role, curating a secondary photography library, helping refine ClearCo's existing booth design and reviewing other brand applications, including video, to keep them consistent with the system.

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