Why We Rebuilt the Hexweb Brand After Eight Years

For eight years, Hexweb was two blue hexagons and a wordmark that ended in a capital B.

That logo was drawn when we were new. It did its job. It got us through 500+ projects for clients in North America and Europe. But at some point I noticed that the work had grown up and the brand hadn’t. We were sending careful, fixed-price proposals to foundations and public agencies under a logo that looked like a startup’s first pitch deck.

So this year we rebuilt it. Here’s what changed, and why.

01 / Where we started

The old mark was two interlocking hexagon outlines: a deep navy one and a lighter periwinkle one, sitting slightly offset. Underneath was “HexweB”, with the B capitalised to echo the H.

The idea behind it was fine: two shapes working together, client and studio. The problem was everything around the idea.

• Two blues competing. Navy and periwinkle were close enough to look like a mistake and far enough apart to fight. Neither one led.
• Outlines, not a shape. Thin strokes disappear at favicon size and on busy backgrounds. The mark only worked large.
• The capital B. It read as playful, and it made the name harder to type the same way twice.

None of this is fatal. But a brand should say what you are now, and ours was describing a younger studio.

02 / The idea

We kept the hexagon. It’s the “hex” in Hexweb, and it’s a good shape for what we do: six equal sides, nothing wasted, and it tiles with its neighbours without gaps. Structure and reliability are exactly what a client buys from a web partner.

Then we asked what was missing. The answer was movement. A hexagon on its own is stable, maybe too stable. So we cut into it.

The final mark is a solid hexagon with one triangular notch taken out of its left side. In the negative space, the notch forms a play button: a forward arrow. Structure and momentum in one shape.

The last detail is the one most people won’t consciously see. A single hairline runs along the edge where the notch opens, so the hexagon’s outline is never broken. The arrow sits inside the shape instead of tearing it open. That’s the precision part: the thing you only notice if it’s missing.

03 / How the logo changed

The mark went through four steps.

1. The old double hex. Two outlines, two blues, “HexweB”.
2. One shape. We stripped it down to a single, solid silhouette that works in one colour at any size. The test was simple: can you draw it from memory, and does it still read at 16 pixels?
3. Four candidates. From that silhouette we explored four one-gesture marks: the Halfmark (half a hexagon, an arrowhead), the Notch (a hexagon with one triangular bite), the Caret (a single code chevron), and the Slash (an outline with one cut through it). The Notch won because it’s the only one that kept the full hexagon and added direction.
4. The hairline. A notch that cuts clean through the edge looks like a chip in the shape. Leaving a hairline of the hexagon in place makes it look intentional. That’s the version on the site today.

The wordmark went lowercase: hexweb. No capital B, no second colour. The logo is ink or paper, nothing else.

04 / Why these choices

Cobalt. We tested several accents on the same black-and-white base: bronze, emerald, violet, taupe, and a single deep navy. Bronze was elegant but too quiet. Emerald and violet were striking but had no link to where we came from. Navy was safe, but it pulled us back toward the old logo. Cobalt (#2E5BFF) kept the thread to our old blues but collapsed two of them into one confident colour. It’s used sparingly: buttons, links, numbers, and less than a tenth of any page.

Ink and paper. The foundation is near-black (#0A0B0D) and a cool off-white (#FBFBFC), with a warm grey for softer sections. High contrast, lots of space, thin rules instead of shadows. It reads more like an editorial layout than a template, which is the point. Our work should look considered, not decorated.

Geist. The typeface is Geist, with Geist Mono for labels and numbering. It’s a clean grotesque with an engineered feel: tight at headline sizes, easy at body sizes. The monospace details (01 / Services, Est. 2018) are a quiet nod to the fact that we build things, not just draw them.

The honeycomb. Where we need a graphic, we use a field of hexagon tiles in shades of cobalt, taken from the interactive grid on our homepage. On proposals, three of those tiles take the client’s own brand colour. It’s a small way of saying: your project sits inside our structure.

05 / What we stand for

The rebrand gave us a chance to write down how we want to sound and look. It came down to five lines.

• Restraint over noise. One accent, generous space, no gimmicks.
• Built properly. Grids, rules and structure you can see, because that’s how we build the parts you can’t.
• Specific, not salesy. Real numbers, fixed quotes, plain sentences.
• Consistent everywhere. The site, the proposals, the email signature and our social pages should feel like the same studio.
• In it for the long game. We want to be the partner you keep as you grow, and a brand should look like it plans to be around.

What’s next

The new brand is live on hexweb.net, in our proposals and in every email we send. If you’ve worked with us before, nothing about how we work has changed. It just finally looks like it.

If you’re thinking about your own brand or website and want an honest second opinion, let’s talk.