Aster is getting a new look!

We refreshed both the Aster mark and the AsterMail mark. The UI you use and love every day is not changing. It is staying the exact same. This is a logo update rather than a full redesign, and the difference does matter. The marks that you see in your browser tab, on your home screen, and next to your name are getting cleaner, but everything inside the app is unchanged.

What did we change?

We refreshed both the Aster mark and the AsterMail mark. The UI you use and love every day is not changing. It is staying the exact same. This is a logo update rather than a full redesign, and the difference does matter. The marks that you see in your browser tab, on your home screen, and next to your name are getting cleaner, but everything inside the app is unchanged.

Why we changed them

Logos do most of their actual work at small sizes, which is the part that does not get talked about nearly as much. The favicon in your browser tab is 16 pixels on its side, the avatar next to a Reddit comment is barely larger, and the notification icon on your phone is somewhere in between.

At those sizes, fine detail stops helping and starts hurting. The previous marks had layered shading that looked good in a hero image but turned bad the moment you shrunk them down into these sizes. The new marks keep the same silhouette and same blue, but the inner forms are simplified enough to stay legible everywhere they show up.

What is not changing

If you were to put the old mark and the new mark side by side, you would recognize them as siblings, and that is totally intentional. The geometric A is still there, the blue gradient is still there, and the overall shape language carries through.

We are not rebranding. We are just simplifying and tightening it up, and that distinction is the entire point. Privacy products live or die on consistency. A company that swaps its brand/identity every six months looks unstable, and instability is the opposite of what we are working towards.

Designed for what comes next

Aster Mail is the first product that we publicly released, and it will not be the last. When we drew the new marks, we drew them so that future products in the Aster family could sit alongside Mail without each one needing a totally different design. The old Aster Mail envelope was a stand-alone illustration that did not extend to anything else. The new mark is part of a system that future product icons can build on without starting from scratch.

Where you will see it first

The new marks will roll out across favicons, app icons, social profile images, and email templates over the coming weeks. The web app and mobile clients will pick them up in the next releases. If you spot an old mark somewhere we missed, please let us know on Discord so we can clean it up.