About our logo

In building Folio Docs and turning Folio Solutions into a real business, we’ve gone through a few iterations of our logo, and today, we have a new mark. Here’s how we got there.

The old one had problems we couldn’t unsee

Our first logo was a little notebook: a rounded rectangle, a spine down the left side, two short lines for text. The idea was that the spine and the lines formed an F, as a subtle twist on the normal document icon.

The problem was that the F-shape didn’t really materialize. The lines floated in the middle of the page, disconnected from the spine, so the F never quite showed up. It left people more puzzled than anything.

There was a second problem, and it mattered more. A notebook says this company makes documents. Folio Docs is our first product, not our only one — there’s a consulting practice running alongside it, and bigger ideas coming down the road. A mark that draws the thing you ship today is a mark you outgrow. We wanted one that carries the name, not the product.

What we drew instead

The new mark is just an F. Three bars — a stem and two arms — leaning forward slightly, with two lighter copies stepping behind it. It’s simple on purpose, and the parts aren’t arbitrary:

The bars are pills. In Folio Docs, the pill shape is ubiquitous. Record Links, Live Fields, Tags, buttons, and pretty much everything you can point to has a pill. The logo’s bars are that same shape, just bigger. We didn’t want a logo that sat next to the product; we wanted one made from it — a shape that belongs to Folio, not to any one product.

The layers are the product’s colors. The two echoes behind the F aren’t a transparency trick. They’re specific blues (#b8c9e1 and #e0e8f2) that live in our design system alongside the brand blue, and they’re the same tones you’ll see stepping through charts and accents in the app. The logo and the interface draw from the same palette.

The lean is motion. The F tips forward 8 degrees and its echoes trail behind it, the way something looks when it’s already moving. That’s not decoration. Speed is the whole point of Folio Docs — finding a Doc, writing in it, pulling a record into a sentence. If the tool makes you stop and think about the tool, we’ve failed. Technology should get out of the way so you can get on with the parts of the job that need a person.

The mark and the name do different jobs. Put the two side by side and they don’t match, which is on purpose. The mark is dimensional, rounded, and blue — three layers with depth and a forward lean. The name beside it is flat: squared-off terminals, ink (#1e293b) for “Folio” and a muted gray (#64748b) for the word that follows it. No color, no depth, no motion.

The mark is the product. It’s the part that should feel quick and a little playful, because that’s what using Folio Docs is like. The name is the company, and a company asking to hold your business’s documents should look steady rather than clever. One is meant to make you smile; the other is meant to make you comfortable signing.

And if you squint, the old notebook is still in there. A tall stroke on the left, two lines of text hanging off it — the spine and the page never really left. We just attached them.

Why blue, still

The main Folio Blue (#2158a2) didn’t change and won’t. It’s a deeper, calmer blue than the platform we live inside, which is roughly the relationship we want: at home in Salesforce, while not pretending to be Salesforce.

That’s it! New logo, same Folio Docs.