Refactoring Unveils a New Brand Identity
Published on 24.12.2025
Introducing Refactoring's New Brand! 🎨
TLDR: The Refactoring newsletter has undergone a major brand identity overhaul. The new design system, created with the Moze design studio, introduces a new logo, a custom font, a refined color palette, and new illustrative elements to create a more cohesive and intentional representation of the newsletter's values across its expanding platforms.
Summary: In this special edition, Luca Rossi provides a thoughtful walkthrough of the decision and process behind Refactoring's rebrand. He explains that while the original visual identity—a mashup of his personal handwriting, colorful drawings, and the cyclone emoji—was authentic, it began to fray at the edges as Refactoring expanded from a newsletter into a podcast, community, and YouTube channel. The lack of a cohesive system led to inconsistent execution and a messy production workflow.
The rebranding process, undertaken with the Italian design studio Moze, was an exercise in codifying the newsletter's core identity. Rossi identifies Refactoring's mission as helping tech leaders build faster, happier, and better teams, with a particular focus on the dynamics of small, effective engineering groups. He distills the publication's values into three key pillars: being Simple (unpacking complexity), Thorough (providing deep, trustworthy insights), and Human (empowering people).
The new brand is the visual manifestation of these values. The tornado icon is now cleaner, the wordmark uses a new custom font called "Refactoring Sans" (a modified, cozier version of Inter Tight), and the color palette has been tweaked for better balance and contrast. A new, charming element is the introduction of "Refactoring faces," a diverse set of hand-drawn characters that represent the human side of the stories told in the newsletter. For an engineering audience, this is a fascinating case study in applying systems thinking to a creative domain. It’s about recognizing that as a product scales, organically grown systems (whether code or brand) often require a deliberate refactoring to maintain coherence and efficiency.
Key takeaways:
- Refactoring's rebrand was driven by the need for a cohesive identity across multiple platforms.
- The process involved defining the brand's core mission (helping small teams be effective) and values (Simple, Thorough, Human).
- The new identity includes a refined logo, a custom font ("Refactoring Sans"), an updated color palette, and new illustrative "faces".
- The project serves as a case study in how to intentionally design a system (in this case, a brand) to reflect its underlying principles.