Spellbook

(2024)

Focus Lab

Visual identity for an AI companion built for commercial lawyers

Overview

Spellbook is an AI companion for commercial lawyers, the people drafting, negotiating and reviewing contracts long after everyone else has logged off.

Founded in 2022, Spellbook takes on the slow, solitary parts of contract work: redlining, chasing definitions, suggesting rewrites and flagging risk. The product had moved fast. The brand hadn’t. It worked, but it looked like every other tool in the category, and it was starting to hold the company back.

The job was to give Spellbook a brand with real magic to it, without losing the trust lawyers need from the tools they rely on.

Studio
Focus Lab

Services
Brand Strategy
Visual Identity
Iconography

Collaborators
Grace Walker (UI Design)

Where It Started

Functional, familiar and almost impossible to tell apart.

We mapped the legal AI landscape and found a wall of cool blues, product screenshots and neutral sans-serifs. Spellbook’s previous identity sat right in the middle of it.

Questing Together

Spellbook doesn’t replace the lawyer. It makes them more powerful.

Working side by side with Spellbook’s team, we defined the attributes (effortless, transformative, essential, with a little magic) and landed on one idea: Questing Together. Every decision after that answered to it.

The Gem

We kept the gem and made it worth keeping.

Early routes chased the “book” in the name, but the strongest equity was already there. We refined the faceted gem into a sharper, more confident centerpiece, a magical object that turns legal work into craft, and paired it with a wordmark set in Ghost by Sharp Type.

Visual Language

Obsidian and white, with a little alchemy.

A near-black called Obsidian anchors the palette alongside white, with six alchemy-named secondaries for the moments that need energy. Arizona Mix by Dinamo leads the typography, with Ghost in support.

Markup Symbols

Built from the marks lawyers already make.

Curls, brackets and carets borrowed from contract annotation become a library of textures, icons and graphic language, instantly familiar to anyone who has ever redlined a draft.