Covenant Eyes Is Getting a New Look

It is an amazing time to be in the Covenant Eyes family. Earlier this year, we redesigned our accountability service to identify and report pornography at the screen level. We also launched our very successful line of Colossal Man commercials, reaching millions of potential new users in a matter of hours. We redesigned our reports to be more user friendly to help our customers and allies have the important conversations that promote long term removal of pornography from their lives.

On March 3, 2020, Covenant Eyes will be 20 years old. We have transitioned from the scrappy, start-up tech company of those early years. Today, we are a formidable force and a leader in the movement against porn. With that in mind, we have decided it is time to dramatically update our branding, which begins with the announcement and reveal of our new logo.

Why change?

Well, it wasn’t an easy decision, and the task of changing it was even more difficult. A logo with 20 years of equity is nothing to cast aside without a good reason. Branding boils down to being understood correctly by your customers and potential customers.

Our original logo just didn’t represent us as the compassionate company that we hope our users feel when they interact with our service. I won’t spend any more of our time together criticizing our original logo. It did the job it needed to, and under its “watch,” Covenant Eyes has prospered.

The New Logo

When I first revealed our new logo to the company, I was asked by a good friend, “Why do you love it?” She said that if she could understand why I love it, then perhaps she could learn to love it as well. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a great answer for her. I just knew that I did indeed “love it.” So, I sat in front of a blank screen thinking on this question.

As I sat there, I realized that I love it because it lets me communicate all the stories about Covenant Eyes that I want to tell. It is so rich in the right kind of symbolism and atmosphere that I basically have free reign to share everything I love about this company and have it be supported in the colors, shapes and space that comprise the new logo.

For instance, the new logo is composed of three overlapping eyes, each representing the three people typically engaged in the recovery process: the user, the spouse, and the ally. These three personas all have access to the accountability report and have a way to see into the activity of user–to hold them accountable for how they use their screens.

The logo takes this symbolism a step further in that two lighter blue eyes feel fused together, symbolic of two people becoming one flesh in a marriage relationship. The strong contrast of the darker blue lets us know there is a third persona in the relationship created through Covenant Eyes that provides balance and support during the process of removing porn from the user’s life. How cool is that?!

Users often engage with our service in a time of crisis, when the use of porn has been newly discovered, or the inability to stop looking has led to an ultimatum where drastic action must be taken or the relationship will end. In these circumstances, the customer’s life and the partner’s life are typically in absolute chaos. At the center of our new mark is a calm quiet circle of pure white surrounded by dynamic rays emanating out from the center.

To me, this is the calm in the midst of the storm. It’s the quiet refuge where both the one who is struggling, and the one who is struggling to stay in the relationship another day, can take a breather and give the software and resources we offer a chance to work. It’s a visual communication of our promise that within the Covenant Eyes service a user can feel safe from judgement and recrimination while he or she recovers from a habit most likely formed at a time when no one knew just how damaging and addictive pornography could be. For me, this is powerful.

Our users come from all walks of life and live in countries across the globe. The rays that radiate out from the center of our logo represent the variety of pathways into our service, and the white circle is the common goal that bonds us all together in our desire to live a life of honesty and purity.

Our culture is saturated with sex and porn, and every employee at Covenant Eyes is committed to changing this. The juxtaposition of the white circle and the expanding rays communicates our commitment to change culture for the better. We are a small company located in the heart of Michigan, but our reach is expanding across the world and we are making an impact. These rays and this simple circle represent our employees working toward a simple powerful goal of purifying our culture and changing lives through the power of accountability.

Our new logo is carefully crafted and precise in its balance and symmetry. It speaks to the idea that advanced technology is behind our service. Indeed, the software that powers our pornography detection software is cutting edge and it offers the most comprehensive coverage of screens that is available. The gradients communicate an emphasis on screens and simultaneously speak to the promise of transformation. These gradients are subtle and indicate that this is not a battle won overnight but over a period of time.

Within the words “Covenant” and “Eyes,” there are also subtle gradients and the presence of two colors. The gradient within the blue violet word “Covenant” gets lightest at the point where it encounters the word “Eyes.” This references the important relationship between the user and the partner–very often a marriage covenant–dark at the beginning but getting lighter and warmer as we move through the word. There is a promise of transformation to the relationship communicated with this subtle change from darkness to light.

And what is the catalyst for this transformation? The ally… encapsulated in the word “Eyes.” These two entities come together and have a profound impact on each other. Maybe you see it, maybe you don’t. For me, it’s there and it is undeniable.

Finally, Covenant Eyes is nothing if not a product of the guidance and excellent stewardship of our leaders. If you’ve never heard our founder and president Ron DeHaas’s story, take a few minutes to listen to it. Covenant Eyes is an amazing legacy that Ron has given to the world, and it was important that we find a way to honor that history in our new mark. As I said, the original logo was designed 20 years ago, and it served our company well for its tenure. Composed of an eye sitting on a shield, we’ve maintained that composition in the new mark and elevated it to encompass a variety of meanings.

To accomplish such an amazing feat of storytelling with just a few shapes and colors is no small task. We hired Bill Gardner and his team from Gardner Design in Wichita Kansas to take on this difficult task, and they over-delivered, in my opinion. Bill is a luminary in the field of logo design and branding. I was fortunate meet him at a small design conference in southwest Georgia in the spring of 2018 and was so impressed with him that when the time came to begin this work, he was at the top of my very short list. He just struck me as someone that Covenant Eyes would want to work with, and my intuition proved right.

From his team, Bill selected Adam Anderson to serve as Art Director for our project and Emily Juhnke, Director of Brand Transformation, to help us figure out the messaging we wanted to instill in the logo. We were so impressed with the logo that we commissioned them to help us overhaul every other aspect of our corporate identity. We also had an amazing team of internal designers and leaders working with Gardner Design to help get us to this point. Our staff has been working diligently to swap out our old logo with the new and provide as seamless an experience for our users as possible. We have had a lot of fun getting to this point.

Over the coming months, you’ll see the new logo, as well as new colors and fonts and photographic approaches begin to show up in your interactions with our service. Our goal is to take the messages instilled in the new logo and apply them to every other aspect of the Covenant Eyes experience. Great brands draw strength from great services, and we have big plans in that area as well. We have a renewed focus on our mission and our customers, and my hope is that this logo and the accompanying branding work makes that clear to the world.

Thanks for reading this far.

God Bless,

Jason Walker

Creative Director