Brand Guidelines

These brand guidelines serve as the definitive reference for how Flexport presents itself to the world. Inside, you'll find everything needed to represent the brand with clarity and consistency — from our mission and company values that ground every decision we make, to the precise rules governing our logo, F-mark, and sub-brand lockups.

The guidelines cover our full color system, including core colors, tints, and gradients, alongside our primary typeface and typographic hierarchy.

Whether you're designing for digital or print, this document is your starting point. Consider this a living document—it will be updated often with new assets and directions, so please check back regularly for the latest version.

It all started with scooters. Before Ryan Petersen founded Flexport, he ran a small e-commerce business with his brother that imported electric scooters from China to sell on eBay. He quickly realized he was at the mercy of the opaque and complex world of global trade: “I had the distinct feeling that every forwarder was ripping me off.” Global logistics was a black hole. Your stuff disappeared for 30 days and when it reappeared, you got a giant bill you weren’t expecting. The big players know what’s happening in the freight markets and use that information to their advantage, leaving everyone else in the dark. No business owner can compete with that. Flexport was founded to fix it.

Every shipment represents someone’s livelihood, a business’s ambition, or a community’s access to goods they couldn’t produce on their own. Flexport exists because we believe that when trade flows more freely, the world gets better for everyone.

Our mission is both a promise and a standard. We move goods, but more importantly we remove the friction, complexity, and opacity that has historically made global logistics one of the hardest things a business has to manage. By making trade easier, we unlock growth for businesses of every size and increase the total volume of global commerce and prosperity.

We’re building AI & technology that empowers brands to automate and optimize their supply chains from factory floor to customer door or retail store, leveraging Flexport’s freight and fulfillment operations, customs brokerage, financing services, and AI technology to deliver cargo on time while saving money. Our AI sees problems before they happen, calculates the fix, and executes it, turning reactive logistics into a predictive, self-optimizing system. Our vision is an autonomous supply chain that improves with every shipment, that enables businesses to focus on creating amazing products and reaching their full potential.

A logo is the most visible representation of a brand. Our logo is a wordmark of our full name, which helps us continue to build awareness and consideration for Flexport globally. The Flexport logo is crafted from bold, lowercase, rounded letterforms. Together these elements help convey approachability, boldness, and structure.

Using the logo exactly as outlined in these guidelines ensures a consistent brand experience.

Our icon should only be used as a favicon and not for any other purpose. The dark version should be placed on Cloud White backgrounds, while the light version should be placed on Midnight Blue or Jet Black backgrounds.

The Flexport logo should never be stretched, rotated, outlined, gradient-filled, re-typed in Antenna, combined with the favicon, or generated by AI. Product names must not use a different font.

To maintain visual consistency across our global presence, we use a unified design system for all product and event branding. Sub-brands must follow our standardized lockup templates to ensure clear alignment with the parent brand.

Note on Location Badges: Legacy office and warehouse location badges are officially out of brand and should no longer be used or published publicly.

Sub-brand logos must use descriptive names that clearly identify their specific product or event. Avoid cutesy or abstract naming to maintain clarity across the brand, e.g. flexteams. Only the Brand Team is authorized to create official logos. If your project requires a new sub-logo, please submit a request to the Brand Team.

In-product only: Antenna Medium, tracking -3%, Midnight Blue or Jet Black.

Events: Antenna Black, tracking -2%, Midnight Blue or Jet Black with a single color from the secondary palette.

Our palette is rooted in the physical world of global commerce. Together, the core colors provide a subtle nod to the environments of trade—land, sky, and sea. This foundational set allows for a cohesive aesthetic that remains versatile for both print and digital applications.

Midnight Blue and Cloud White form the foundation of the brand across all touchpoints. Together, they create a bold, high-contrast pairing that works equally well across digital and print applications.

The secondary palette extends the brand's visual range with a curated family of blues and greens that echo the environments of global commerce. Each color is available across a range of values, from rich, saturated tones to lighter, offering flexibility without losing cohesion.

Each palette color is available in a full range of shades and tints. The lighter tints are intended primarily for functional UI purposes — backgrounds, hover states, dividers, and surface fills. The darker shades are used for text on white or light backgrounds, ensuring strong legibility and contrast across all applications.

Inspired by the shifting tones of the sky, the gradient reflects the seamless movement of cargo from origin to destination. It is used sparingly as a background where added visual weight is needed.

These colors are reserved exclusively for data, chart reporting and website or product states. Unlike our primary and secondary palettes, these colors are not brand identifiers and should never be used as dominant design elements in public-facing marketing, advertising, or general brand layouts.

Warning: used for warning states, system delays, or pending statuses that require attention but are not system-blocking.

Error: used for critical errors, system alerts, blocked workflows or supply chain disruptions.

We use two typefaces — Zalando Sans for content that needs to be read, and Roboto Mono for the small structural details that frame it. Together they give Flexport a clear voice: modern, deliberate, and easy to follow at any scale.

Zalando Sans is our primary typeface — used for headings, paragraphs, and most copy across our website. Its slim, modern character (especially in the ExtraLight and Light weights that anchor our headlines) feels confident and contemporary without shouting. We pair it with generous line heights to keep content readable at every size, and treat it as the default voice of our brand.

Roboto Mono is our accent typeface — reserved for eyebrows, CTAs, and small structural details. Its monospaced characters and uppercase treatment add a precise, system-like quality to the brand — a quiet nod to the data, code, and schedules that power our work. We use it sparingly but consistently, as the punctuation around our main content.

Good typography adds clarity to what we say and confidence to how we say it. The example below shows a type scale applied to Flexport messaging — use it as a general guideline for how to treat different hierarchies across every level. You may need to make specific optical adjustments based on the medium (print, digital, presentation) and size at which the text will appear.

Our typographic hierarchy is designed to remain clean, intentional, and highly legible across any canvas layout. The examples below demonstrate how headlines, eyebrows, and body copy can adapt to various content densities—from low-text title slides to dense multi-column layouts.

Our grid system is the underlying rhythm behind every layout we create, ensuring consistency across all brand touchpoints. It’s built on the same 8-point system that anchors our entire design system.

Whether defining columns on a website, aligning text boxes on a marketing slide, or establishing margins on a corporate document, adhering to this system ensures a flexible and harmonious approach to content layout.

In our design system every column, margin, and gutter resolves to a multiple of 8. This structure gives us a modular approach to stacking content in our page designs. This system also supports the 2-up and 4-up arrangements that a lot of our modules in the design system use.

Desktop & Tablet: 8 columns with 24px margins and gutters. Mobile: 4 columns with 24px margins and gutters.

Presentation slides inherit the same foundational 8-column structure as our desktop website layout. To accommodate data-heavy decks, we introduce horizontal rows to establish a layout grid. This provides clear alignment axes for charts, images, and secondary graphics, ensuring they cleanly anchor alongside our narrative slide text.

Social media graphics require maximum layout flexibility to support a diverse range of aspect ratios, such as 1:1 squares, 4:5 verticals, or 9:16 stories. For these mobile-first environments, we implement a 4-column framework anchored by generous 80px margins and gutters. This oversized spacing logic provides an intentional safety buffer, ensuring that when the layout scales down onto mobile viewports, the content maintains adequate breathing room and never feels cramped.

Multi-page assets like US Letter or A4 documents translate our system into a flexible 8-column layout. We introduce an intentional 48pt outer margin—equivalent to 0.66" or 17mm—paired with 24pt gutters (0.33" or 8.5mm). This amplified spacing functions as a production safeguard against physical binding constraints and printer grip tolerances, ensuring typography doesn’t get clipped.

Flexport moves things — globally, predictably, and without friction. Our entire brand ecosystem should feel the same way. See below for core examples of how motion brings our brand to life across all mediums.

“Moving from A to B” anchors our motion design in the concept of progression. By animating elements from origin to destination, we visually reinforce the idea of forward momentum. This is seen in micro-interactions like our website buttons, and on a larger scale through staggered reveals across graphics and other layouts.

Typography should introduce itself in deliberate steps rather than abrupt transitions. Headlines, text blocks or assets should use a smooth fade-in combined with a subtle upward shift, while technical eyebrows animate in with a precise ticker effect.

Data in motion should always feel accurate, active, and data-driven. Whether visualized abstractly through particle flows or literally through stepping metrics, dynamic animation transforms static numbers into powerful, fluid stories of global connectivity.

Our iconography is designed for maximum clarity and utility. They should be used to simplify complex information, never as pure decoration. To ensure consistency and readability, always provide enough breathing room around icons and keep consistent sizing across groups of icons.

Our icons live inside a square frame rather than floating on their own. Each glyph sits centered on a solid background color, giving it a consistent visual weight wherever it appears. We use four variants: black, indigo, navy, and white, each paired with its own background tint so the icon stays legible on light or dark surfaces alike.

Icons carry a lot of weight in our system, they orient people fast and add clarity without adding clutter. The examples below show how icons scale across layouts, from a simple four-icon row on a title slide to denser, multi-column decks where icons anchor each section.

Photography is how we bring real human stories and scenes of global trade to life. Whether photography is from the Flexport photo library, a custom photo shoot, or from a stock image search, selecting high-quality imagery with consistent lighting is fundamental to building an authentic brand experience.

Focus on bright, breathable imagery—using generous negative space to keep compositions light, uncluttered, and calm.

Flexport photography has three general categories. Global trade environment: manufacturing and warehouse scenes, modes of transit, and products in retail environments. Texture: close up or zoomed out textures, patterns and materials of the supply chain and natural environment. People: those working throughout the global supply chain, our customers, and their end consumers.

Photographs from these different categories can tell a story together, or a strong single image can tell a story independently.

Below are visual guardrails for how photography appears across our brand ecosystem. Use airy, light-filled compositions with plenty of negative space, unscripted and authentic movement, and environments that feel genuinely attainable. Avoid lens flare, overly staged setups, clearly AI-generated images of transportation modes or people, and dark or muted photography.

Use headshots to promote event speakers. In order to unify headshots with varying quality and backgrounds, we apply a consistent light neutral background: Sky Blue. This background choice aligns with the visual brand system.

If an available headshot is professionally shot on a simple, textured background, it can be used as is. So long as the full set of headshots in the composition are harmonious together, it does not need to be placed on the unifying Sky Blue background.

Whether in a presentation, a dashboard, or a report, Flexport's data visualizations — including tables, charts, and timelines — deliver a clean, contemporary aesthetic that uses our signature typography and brand colors.

Graphs bring data to life. Always use our typography and brand colors to keep values clear at a glance. For graphs with 6 or fewer data sets, we can use a monochromatic or multicolored palette. For 7 or more, a multicolored palette is recommended — the extra range helps distinguish each data set.

Tables are for structured comparison. Set headings in Zalando Sans, keep column widths consistent, and use our light dividers to guide the eye across rows without cluttering the layout.

Flexport's design team uses a web-based tool to produce dynamic brand textures — from particle-mapped imagery to looping animations of global transit corridors. Assets are available in static, motion, or interactive formats for digital platforms, social channels, and large-scale presentations. See below for a summary of the tool's four key modes.

Access to this tool is limited to Flexport's design team and approved brand partners.

All assets produced with this tool use one of our defined presets under 'Apply a look'. Each preset has been crafted in our brand colors and tuned to visualize free-flowing global trade. They work as dynamic brand textures — either as stills or as slow, ambient videos in digital environments. Any color combination outside these presets must use only defined Flexport brand colors.

Flexport Midnight uses Midnight Blue 500 as the base swatch with Indigo 600 as the highlight. Flexport Indigo uses Indigo 700 with Seafoam 600. Flexport Gradient combines the Flow Field texture with the brand gradient and is used most prominently in our footer. Flexport White uses Cloud White with Indigo 600.

Below are visual guardrails for how 'Flow Field' assets appear across our brand ecosystem. Don't speed up the animation — use the speed built into the presets. Don't place live text directly on the animation — use our glass panel treatment to separate text and animation. Don't map particles onto people or lifestyle imagery — use real-life photography for those.

Our UI asset library includes two core presentation styles: a Full Product View enclosed in a sleek glass frame for broad, contextual showcases, and a Condensed Animated View tailored for web performance. The web version highlights isolated product interactions through subtle motion to make complex features instantly understandable.

Elevate the Flexport event experience with evergreen collateral featuring contemporary typography and ASCII artwork for major keynotes, paired with industrial, metal lanyards for a premium arrival experience.

Flexport merchandise reflects our core values and aligns seamlessly with everything we do, from technical waterproof travel bags, luggage straps, recycled plastic storage and notebooks. Every premium item features intentional brand placement, enhanced by our subtle micro-mono typeface.

Flexport’s social media blends clean, contemporary design with short, sharp copy, utilizing dynamic imagery and video to reflect our core brand values. The examples below feature a client story, promote a live broadcast and new product features.

Questions or requests about the Flexport brand? Submit a ticket to the Brand Team.