Scalingo
A new brand for an ambitious European PaaS scaling up to to take on the American hyperscalers.
Context
Taking on the hyperscalers
Scalingo is a European cloud platform that helps startups and scaleups launch and run apps without managing infrastructure themselves. Built by developers for developers, it had already earned trust for technical credibility and unusually good support.
With plans to scale its operations and services across Europe, Scalingo needed a brand that could position it as a credible alternative to the American hyperscalers, without compromising the clarity, trust, and reassurance that made people choose it in the first place.
Insight
From Infrastructure to Reassurance
In interviews, users kept coming back to Scalingo’s support: technically impeccable, transparent, responsive, and human. Just as importantly, it felt local, part of the same European world as the people using it.
Scalingo’s real differentiator wasn’t infrastructure, but reassurance. That reframing became the centre of gravity for the brand work.
From there, the creative direction took on a clearer shape: support rather than heroics, speed without stress, teamwork over individual display, and a dependable presence in a competitive, high-performance environment, all with a distinctly European inflection.
Motif L’Équipier
The Motif is an element that gives the brand’s underlying logic a visible centre. For Scalingo, that Motif was l’Équipier: a figure built from ASCII characters in a terminal-style font. It links the world of developer tools to the Tour de France, named after the teammate whose role is support rather than glory.
Typography
ABC Favorit carries the main brand voice. IBM Plex Mono appears in technical moments, adding precision.
Colors
Orange and dark brown for the human side of the brand. Blue for the product and technology.
Icons
Simple isometric forms and ASCII-inspired details give the system a technical language.
In action
Built for key moments and everyday use
Scalingo’s system was built to flex across different kinds of communication: big brand moments, everyday content, hiring, editorial, and print.
Website, the brand goes to work
The website is where the system goes to work, with grids, buttons, links, product colours, and UI bringing it to life.
Print applications show the system outside the browser, extending the identity beyond product and website.
Social / editorial
The system gives everyday content a consistent structure without making every post feel the same.
UI components
Buttons, links, states, and product colours turn the brand into a usable interface system.
