Clay Global rebrands the ‘Google for the semiconductor industry’

The Brand Identity: When you tap your card, the data that shows is something like ‘SQ *COFFEESHP 855-123-4567,’ and the system at the other end has to work out what it means. Micro-electronics has its own version of that problem, multiplied across more than a million board-level components, where two parts can look nearly identical and differ only in a manufacturer, supplier, availability status or by a single line of spec.

Partstack is the search engine built to make sense of that inventory – connecting buyers and sellers of microchips and other components in a unified ecosystem. Clay, the global branding and UX design agency, partnered with the platform to evolve its identity and redesign the website around how people actually use it. “The hardest challenge was not just the scale of the catalogue, but the density of decision-making inside it,” explains Design Director Aleksandr Ratasep.

“Users have to navigate thousands of highly similar parts, where small differences can change the decision.” The original logomark was built around stacked elements, and had become central enough to the company’s recognition. This was a key consideration for Clay in response to Partstack’s brief to make the brand look ‘modern and future-ready.’ They decided to keep the symbol, simplifying it alongside a completely new wordmark.

Clay changed it from CamelCase to lowercase, closing it into a single seamless word without capitalisation or breaks, and customised the typography into a cleaner, more tech-forward read. The logo gets its character from a small decision about corners. Clay gave the individual parts two different treatments, rounded on some edges and bevelled on the left and right. “The rounded corners represent flexibility, while the bevelled corners stabilise the logomark and add a more robust tech vibe,” details Oleg Turbaba, Brand Design Director at Clay.

The pairing gives the mark a technical feel with a softer edge, sitting cleanly against the new wordmark. Two typefaces are used throughout the system, split by the kind of work each does best. Aeonik represents the brand’s personality – an industrial sans that Clay chose for headlines and the moments where Partstack needs a voice. Inter, on the other hand, does the heavy lifting.

“Because the search engine displays a massive amount of data, we needed a font that is highly readable at very small sizes,” Turbaba explains, which is why it runs the body text, the technical specifications, and the search results themselves. For the illustrations, Clay extended a device Partstack already used – line-art representations of product categories drawn from engineering schematics – and built two more layers on top of it: clay renders (no relation to the agency) behind, full product renders lit with a purple counter-light for accents, and the original line art carrying the catalogue navigation.

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The rebranding of a significant player in the semiconductor industry has substantial implications for brand strategy, particularly in a highly technical field, while the approach taken is somewhat standard for modern rebranding efforts.