ProtonBlog(new window)

The story behind the Proton Pass logo

Share this page

You’ve probably seen by now that Proton Pass, our new password manager, was added to the Proton ecosystem. Earlier this month, Proton Pass entered public beta for Proton community members on our Lifetime and Visionary plans, and with it came a brand-new logo.

Proton Pass allows us to fulfill a longstanding demand from the Proton community, and it will enable more people to protect more of their information. We’ve shared the story behind why we built Proton Pass(new window) and how its encryption works(new window) — now we’d like to share the design story behind Proton’s newest logo.

The diamond

An often-underestimated part of product design is picking a product name and logo. While it seems like a trivial point, it can be as important to the success of a product as the technical details. With Proton Pass, we knew we wanted to keep Pass in the name to make it clear what the product does and align it with the Proton ecosystem’s naming principles.

The logo, on the other hand, took much longer and involved numerous iterations. In total, Proton’s in-house creative studio spent nearly three months researching and building concepts, focusing on what it means to be a good password manager. This led us to our final diamond concept. 

A password manager must be hardened, particularly its cryptography, to protect against cyberattacks. As one of the hardest substances known to man, a diamond seemed appropriate.

Your passwords are inherently precious since they let you access your most sensitive and valuable accounts. A diamond similarly conveys this feeling of preciousness. It’s something worth protecting, just like your passwords.

The Proton Pass logo isn’t just a diamond; it also represents a keyhole. Passwords are the keys to your life, and with Proton Pass, you can not only keep your passwords safe, you can also safely access and (in the future) share them.

In the same way that the other Proton product logos represent a portal into a parallel universe that’s secure and private, passing through the Proton Pass keyhole takes you to a safe and private place to store your personal information, maintaining consistency with the rest of the Proton logos. 

Discover the story behind Proton’s logos(new window)

A scalable design

Proton Pass is unique among Proton products in that the logo must be recognizable across multiple scales. The logo isn’t just used as a large application icon on your device’s home screen. It must also appear in small web forms, such as username and password fields.

This requires a design that can keep its integrity across a wide range of resolutions, which is a challenge because small details and features can quickly become lost as you scale the graphics down. This was another factor that led to our selection of the diamond because it works on multiple scales and remains distinct from other Proton product logos. 

Color scale

Like our other product icons, Proton Pass starts with the Proton purple, a call back to the purple used in the Proton Mail beta from 2014. It then fades into a secondary yellow-orange color unique to Pass, maintaining the Proton ecosystem style. Proton Pass’s color universe references a sunset to convey the well-being, comfort, and security that we hope will accompany Proton Pass users through their journey online.

Design for the future

The Proton Pass logo has a strong family resemblance to the rest of the Proton logos. However, for long-time members of the Proton community, Proton Pass’s look and feel probably stand slightly apart. The details make it clear Pass is part of Proton, but it also doesn’t look like any other Proton app that has come before. This isn’t an accident, and we look forward to sharing why that is the case later this year. 

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts. You can join the conversation at reddit.com/r/ProtonPass(new window).

Protect your privacy with Proton
Create a free account

Share this page

Thibaud Eberwein(new window)

Thibaud is Proton's lead designer and the head of our Creative Studio. Before joining Proton, he was the creative and UX director at several French and Swiss corporations. He has a bachelor's degree in design and a master's in digital marketing and management of digital organizations.

Related articles

Even though the Snowden leaks came out 10 years ago, the United States never ended its unconstitutional surveillance program. It now has a chance to close the legal loopholes that allow warrantless spying on US citizens. But Congress needs to act bef
Over the past year, hackers have been using new and clever techniques to steal people’s online data. At Proton, we’ve been monitoring these evolving strategies and updating our defenses to stay ahead of the arms race.  Often, the attacks involve new
password fatigue
Most people in the digital age have dozens, if not hundreds, of passwords, and keeping track of them is tiring, to say the least. If you’re suffering from password fatigue, you’ll be happy to know there’s an easy fix. The short answer is that you sh
are password managers safe?
Password managers are a great way to generate secure passwords, keep them in encrypted storage together with your credit card details, and improve your online security across the board. But you might be worried about keeping so much sensitive data in
Most of us probably wouldn’t consent to sharing photos of our family and friends with random strangers on the internet. But that’s exactly what we do when we automatically sync our pictures to the non-private servers of Big Tech companies, which can
Google Drive is the world’s most popular cloud storage service by far, with over 3 billion people using Google Workspace (which includes Google Drive, Google Calendar, Gmail, and more). But this ubiquity has recently caused concern following several