Order's type-led identity for payroll platform Justworks builds on the simple idea of support

Founded in 2012 as Clockwork, Inc by Isaac Oates, Justworks provides payroll, employee benefits, HR and compliance support for US-based businesses. Fast forward to 2020, they’re the fastest-growing HR company in the US, with over 600 employees, $143m raised in funding and more than 90,000 people integrated onto its platform. To better align their brand with their growth, Justworks sought a new, confident and approachable identity from Brooklyn-based design office Order.

As Justworks customers themselves, Order explain that they “have seen firsthand their obsession with customer service and support.” Fuelled by their own experiences, they devised a type-driven identity system centred around the simple idea of ‘support’. At its core lives Oately, a functional yet characterful typeface named after Justworks’ founder, developed in close collaboration with international typographers Colophon Foundry. “When we talked about the initial direction with them early on,” Order’s Garrett Corcoran tells us, “they came back with a deep library of spot-on references.” As a result, they “were confident they’d design a typeface that would follow our concept first and foremost.”

Inspired by 19th-century sans serifs and designed to shine on screen, Oately balances utilitarian necessity with expressive boldness, making it a meticulous fit for every facet of the brand. “We’d found a lot of typefaces from the 19th-century era and style in early machine manuals and catalogues,” Corcoran explains, adding that “Justworks is driven by helping people make their businesses work, so we wanted the typeface itself to have roots in that idea.”

The typeface sits at the heart of a modular and colourful visual system, which revolves around three core pillars: ‘Support’, ‘Highlight’ and ‘Focus’. Each is visually represented through a varying block and type combination, resulting in a flexible framework for Justworks to unpredictably deploy to any application. Elementary colours act as an evolution of the company’s previous palette, which, in combination with the rigorous typographic system, provides the company with an identity fit for the future.

Order

Justworks