On 10 October 2026, Kalex Studio became studiokalex. One word, all lowercase, even at the start of a sentence. A new mark, a new colour, a single typeface, and nine days later a new address at studiokalex.com.
We make brands for other people for a living, so making our own felt a little like being asked to describe your own face. Here is what went through our heads, and the fifteen-second film we made to say it out loud.
A name with too many spellings
The old name never quite held still. Depending on where you met us, we were Kalex, Kalex Studio, KalexStudio or kalex.studio. A name with four spellings is a name nobody remembers properly.
studiokalex is a single word that works as the name, the wordmark, the handle and the address. Writing it in lowercase, every time, makes it read less like a company registration and more like a signature.
We fell out of love with our purple
The old identity was a kl monogram on a purple gradient, with a near-black loading screen. It was fine. It also looked like a hundred software dashboards, and most of our client conversations are spent arguing against exactly that kind of fine. We have written about why so many brands end up looking the same; it felt odd to keep wearing one of those looks ourselves.
One circle, and nothing else
The new mark is a solid cream circle beside the word. No badge, no container, no monogram. The circle is as tall as the type, and the word is centred on it rather than sitting on its baseline, so the two read as one shape.
We wanted a mark you could draw from memory that still works at sixteen pixels. Our favicon is now just that circle on a transparent background. Yes, it is faint on a white browser tab. We kept it anyway.
Two colours and a rule about them
Cobalt #1800AD is the only accent. Cream #FFFEEA is the second colour. Everything else is black, white and two greys, and the greys are only for cards, rules and chips, never for text. Every word on the site is at full strength: if something matters less, it gets smaller, not paler.
There are no gradients anywhere. Where we once reached for a gradient, we now reach for a field of dots. If you are choosing colours for your own brand, our guide to brand colours walks through how we think about it.
One typeface, one weight
Poppins Medium, and only Poppins Medium. No bold, no light, no second family for headings; hierarchy comes from size alone. It is a stricter rule than we would usually hand a client, and that was the point. A small studio's brand gets applied by whoever is in a hurry, and a rule with no exceptions survives that. (More on picking and licensing type in our brand fonts guide.)
Softer, rounder, and always moving
Corners come in three sizes: small, card and fully round. Buttons carry no brand colour, just a black pill with a white label. And nothing changes colour when you hover over it. Things move instead: links draw a line under themselves, card headings slide, buttons lift. We sell motion, so the brand should behave like it.
Why .com, after all that
On 19 October we moved from kalex.studio to studiokalex.com. A .studio address felt clever to us, but people recognise .com, and an address that needs explaining isn't doing its job.
Every old link redirects to the new one, and mail to the old address still reaches us, though hello@studiokalex.com is the one to use now. Search for Kalex Studio and you will still find us, because we have told search engines the two names belong to the same studio. Keeping people with you through a change like this is its own small project; we wrote about how to rebrand without losing customers.
Making the film
We didn't want a logo sting. We wanted the whole rebrand told in fifteen seconds: the old cards and the kl monogram, a coin that flips from old to new, the words "kalex studio" rearranging themselves into "studiokalex", then the palette, the type, the dots, and the circle landing at the end.
Most of it is built in code, as a timeline where every frame is a function of time, with each cut landing on a beat. The coin flip, a tunnel of rings and a burst of coins were rendered in Blender and composited in. The first cut bounced too much and snapped between shots, so we rebuilt it so that every shot keeps moving through the cut. It runs at 60 frames a second, and here it plays with the sound off.
What didn't change
The people, the work and the way we run projects. We still design and build websites, 3D, motion and brand identities from New Delhi, for clients worldwide. Only the name on the door is new.
Thinking about a rebrand of your own? Start with our rebranding checklist, or see how we approach brand identity design.