Gusto has a brand-new look. We’ve evolved our brand and identity system to reflect who we are today, where we’re headed, and the ambition of the small businesses we serve.
Our mission is to grow the small business economy with technology and heart, and we started delivering on it by solving one important problem for small business owners: payroll. From there we took on one problem after another: benefits, HR, compliance, retirement, tax credits, and financial tools. Small businesses don't run neatly between nine and five, in one place, or one screen. It happens between meetings, after hours, on the move–wherever decisions need to be made and work needs to get done.
Gusto is built to meet business owners wherever they’re working—on Slack, over text, in ChatGPT or Claude. We’re a teammate that understands how small businesses work, what they need to grow, and we take action to help them meet their goals.
We’ve spent time thinking about what our brand needs to say, and partnered with Smith & Diction, a Philadelphia design studio to make it happen. We ended up with a comprehensive evolution of our brand, built to match what Gusto is now, our ambition and that of the small businesses we serve.
Better, not bigger
We’re built for people bold enough to start and build small businesses. Our customers are people with ideas, and the drive to create something of their own. We support them at all stages of their journey, from solopreneurs to sophisticated businesses with dozens of employees, managing contractor payments and multi-state compliance.
Our customers are ambitious. They start businesses because they want something better: better for their team, better for their community, better for their own life. Better does not necessarily mean bigger. That idea is at the heart of our brand and what we wanted this refresh to capture.
You'll see that same instinct running through the whole brand refresh. We didn’t start from scratch. We took the foundation of our brand (our colors, our voice, our beloved Penny) and made it better: more confident, more expressive, more capable of representing everything Gusto has become. Better, for us, meant being deliberate about what we kept, what we sharpened, and what we let go of.
What actually changed
Gusto’s refreshed brand echoes the inherent power of small business owners, with vibrant fields of energy and hardworking grit working together in equal, inextricable parts.
A brighter more energetic color palette.
We rooted the new look in Gusto’s existing color palette, and we turned up the volume. Our reds got warmer and brighter. Our blues got more confident. And we introduced a new punchy, energetic pink we’re calling Superpower Pink, used as an accent rather than a background, so it reads as a spark.
Typefaces with bold personality.
We built two custom typefaces for our brand. Gusto Brut, for headlines and key moments, is expressive and a little raw around the edges, built to carry the audacity of our voice. Gusto Matter, for body copy and everywhere else, is clean, steady, and balanced. Together, they help us read bold without losing the sense that we’re dependable.
A more mature and comprehensive illustration system.
Our illustration has always been rooted in humanity, and we didn’t want to lose that, but we wanted it to grow up. We kept the handmade quality that has always set it apart: visible texture, organic brushstrokes, human proportions that read as real people. What changed is the confidence and range within that style. We added more color, more intricate detail, and scenarios with a genuine sense of fun, so the same handmade warmth now carries a lot more energy.
A system of textures and shapes with flexibility and momentum.
Our Flow State visual language is rooted in communicating that Gusto is flexible, ever-changing, and always ready to adapt to evolving business needs. Geometric shapes and fluid textures are a graphic representation of the feeling of being immersed in your work, in the flow, doing what you love.
Every choice is in service of a feeling: that Gusto is energetic without being chaotic, confident without being cold, and expressive without losing an ounce of the reliability our customers depend on us for.
Art direction rooted in humanity
Small business owners are often shown as tired, overwhelmed, and in need of help. Or they’re cast as local heroes and community builders. There’s truth in those stories. Yet, we also see something else every day: small businesses that are courageous in their decisions, relentless in pursuit of their goals, and resilient in the face of setbacks. They are a force that builds something out of nothing. We wanted our brand to make sure to represent this in our art direction.
In photography, our subjects look directly into the camera rather than being caught unaware, with the same confidence you’d expect from a lifestyle magazine. In video, we often shoot from the point of view of the work itself, embedded right alongside the action, so our customers feel like they’re driving the scene rather than being observed from a distance. Motion carries the same intent throughout the brand: quick and purposeful, but with room for small, human details, a bit of sparkle, a satisfied beat after a hard shift, that make our customers feel unmistakably real rather than staged.
A voice with a bias for action
For a long time, our brand voice played it safe: clear, helpful, competent advice. All still true today, and all still essential. But we wanted our voice to carry more energy, more action, and more of the ambition it takes to start and run a small business. Uncertainty is the enemy we’re writing against: the sense that your business’s future is out of your hands, that hiring and taxes and compliance are too complicated to ever feel confident about. Courage is the feeling we’re writing toward: the sense that you can make bold calls in your business and trust that Gusto is by your side to help you handle the hard stuff.
By speaking with powerful frankness and bright humanity, Gusto helps small business owners feel gutsy, confident, and capable of anything.
Giving Penny a glow-up
If there’s one piece of this refresh that mattered most to us, it’s Penny. She’s Gusto’s mascot, and she’s genuinely cherished by customers and employees alike. Whatever else changed in this brand, Penny couldn’t lose an ounce of what makes her Penny: her charm, her joy, and the particular brand of happy-go-lucky that everyone’s grown to love.
So we treated her glow-up carefully. We explored a range of different colors and different body shapes before landing on something that felt just a little more intricate and expressive. We obsessed over details that might sound small but mattered enormously: the exact curve of her smile, the size and shape of her ears, the way she hops as she prances along. Her eyes ended up being the detail that mattered most, the piece that truly makes her, her.
The result is unmistakably Penny, just with a little more pep in her step. She’s thrilled with how she turned out, and so are we.
Finally looking like ourselves
A brand refresh isn’t about changing our look . It’s about looking more like ourselves. Gusto has spent years becoming a teammate to over five hundred thousand small businesses.
It’s built for people who didn’t start a business to play it safe. They want something better, for themselves, their team, and their community. Gusto was built to solve those problems uniquely for small businesses, and now, we have a brand that can claim that wholeheartedly.
Starting a small business takes 💪 guts. Running one takes ❤️ Gusto.
