Design Strategy

How visual design decisions translate into competitive advantage and buyer confidence.

Every major Kastle competitor uses blue.

This prototype focuses on one direction: Brand Authority — the current Kastle identity, elevated. Brand red on white preserves the visual DNA of today's kastle.com while correcting its structural problems — missing CTAs, anonymous testimonials, form friction.

A website redesign is the ideal moment to evolve the brand itself. The website is the highest-traffic expression of the brand — every design decision made here ripples outward into sales collateral, trade show materials, product UI, and partner communications. Rather than treat the redesign as a cosmetic update to the existing identity, we see an opportunity to elevate Kastle's visual brand simultaneously — modernizing the mark, tightening the system, and creating assets that work harder across every channel.

The revised logo system below is one example of what this looks like in practice.

Example

Revised Logo System

Light Mode

Primary usage on white and light surfaces — marketing pages, documentation, print collateral.

Brand Mode

High-impact placement on brand red surfaces — hero sections, event signage, social banners.

Dark Mode

Reversed for dark contexts — video overlays, dark UI, partner co-branding on dark backgrounds.

The updated castle mark retains Kastle's iconic identity while introducing dimensional depth that communicates solidity and modernity — qualities buyers expect from a 50-year security leader. The three-mode system ensures the brand works consistently across every context, from a white marketing page to a dark product dashboard. This is just the starting point — a full brand elevation engagement would extend to iconography, illustration style, photography direction, and motion language.

What Brand Elevation Includes

Beyond the logo, a simultaneous brand refresh during the website redesign can address:

The color system is built on OKLCH, the perceptually uniform color space adopted by Tailwind CSS v4. OKLCH ensures that colors with the same lightness value actually appear equally bright to the human eye — something HSL cannot guarantee.

Semantic status colors complement the brand red without conflicting:

Shifting to an AA-Compliant Brand Red

Kastle's current brand red (#D72329) passes WCAG AA contrast on white backgrounds (5.1:1) but falls short on black (4.2:1). For a brand that needs to work on dark hero overlays, dark-mode dashboards, and light marketing pages alike, that gap creates an accessibility liability.

We recommend a subtle shift to #E2242A — perceptually identical to the current red, but calibrated to pass AA on both white and black backgrounds simultaneously. The difference is invisible to the eye but measurable in compliance.

DM Sans is the primary typeface throughout the design system.

Design decisions are not aesthetic preferences. They are business decisions with measurable outcomes.