Overview
Shield AI is a venture-backed defense technology company whose mission is to protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems. In pursuit of this mission, Shield AI is building the world's best AI pilot. It's pilot, Hivemind, has flown a fighter jet (F-16), a vertical takeoff and landing drone (V-BAT), and a quadcopter (Nova). The company has offices in San Diego, Dallas, Washington D.C., and abroad. Shield AI's products and people are currently in the field actively supporting operations with the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. allies.
The Brand Redesign
Shield AI was established in 2015 by Ryan Tseng, Brandon Tseng, and Andrew Reiter to bring the best of AI and autonomy technology to the DoD and our allies. At its inception, a logo was purchased through an online resource which the founders felt embodied the technology that was being created at Shield AI. However, one of the main issues we identified early on was that exclusive rights were never attained with this logo mark, enabling other companies to use the same logo.
In late 2020, my team and I were tasked with a brand refresh. The first step we took was to gain exclusive rights to the logo. Once exclusive rights to the mark were attained, we worked to refine the logo to not only modernize it, but to make it stand out against logo marks of other companies in the defense technology industry. It needed to be strong. It needed to be scalable. We did away with the multi-color scheme, chose typography for the word mark that was bolder and more modern, and designed a series of lockups that would reproduce well across print and digital mediums.
