Building the Hargora Brand in a Single Afternoon

When two companies merge, the brand question is usually the hardest. Months of workshops. Mood boards. Agency pitches. "What does the combined entity feel like?" PowerPoints with words like "kinetic" and "liminal" and "unapologetically forward."

We did it in an afternoon.

The inheritance

Harvey's visual identity is a masterclass in restraint: black, white, and a serif typeface that says "we went to the same law school as your managing partner." No logo mark. No icon. Just the name, in Canela, on a dark background. The aesthetic equivalent of a navy suit.

Legora arrived with something different. Their mark — a four-pointed star with softened right angles — belongs to a shape that has quietly become the universal signifier for "this product uses AI." You've seen it on a hundred landing pages. Anthropic has one. Google has one. Every Series A deck filed since 2023 has at least three. Legora's version is well-executed: balanced, distinctive, and rendered in a forest green that photographs well on Scandinavian office walls.

They'd spent good money on it. We could tell, because the kerning was excellent and the SVG had been hand-optimised rather than exported from Figma at 3 AM.

The H

The combined entity needed a mark. We considered hiring an agency. We considered running a design sprint. We considered asking the AI.

Instead, someone on the brand team opened Legora's SVG in a code editor, duplicated the four-pointed star, offset the copy by 12 units to the right, and applied a clip mask.

Two overlapping stars. Trimmed at the edges. The negative space between the vertical strokes of the overlapping points formed something unmistakable: the letter H.

Total design time: about forty minutes. Thirty of which were spent arguing about how much to trim off the sides.

The trim debate

This turned out to be the only real design decision. The clip mask determines how much of each star's outer points are visible. Too wide, and it looks like two separate shapes. Too narrow, and you lose the organic softness of the original star — the H becomes mechanical, which defeats the point of inheriting the mark.

We tested four trim levels. The tightest version (clip x=8, w=16) reduced the star points to stubs. The widest (clip x=3.5, w=25) preserved the full width of the overlapping forms. We went with the widest. It felt right. It felt like you were looking at an H that had grown rather than been constructed.

Someone described it as "if the letter H lifted weights, and then went to a really good spa." We wrote that down and then threw it away.

Colour

Harvey is white on black. Beautiful. Sleek. Premium. The visual equivalent of a corner office with no personal items in it.

Legora is dark forest green (#00301e). Warm. Organic. Scandinavian. The visual equivalent of a corner office with one very expensive plant.

We needed a colour that honoured both. White meets dark green. We tried averaging the hex values. We tried overlaying them at 50% opacity. We tried asking the AI. Then someone on the brand team opened a colour picker and dragged the hue slider until it landed on lime (#d0f289) — a brighter, lighter green that borrows Harvey's luminance and Legora's hue. Bright enough to pop on dark backgrounds. Organic enough to feel like it grew there.

It is the exact midpoint between "we take ourselves very seriously" and "we are from Stockholm." We liked it immediately. It was the only colour decision that took less time than the trim debate.

On dark backgrounds the mark renders in sage (#a1c699) with the lime as the accent. On cream, it inverts to the forest. The wordmark is set in DM Serif Display — close enough to Harvey's editorial tone, open-source enough that nobody has to negotiate a type licence during merger integration.

The name

We cannot claim credit for "Hargora." That belongs to Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer, who coined it in passing on March 16 while writing about Legal Week. It is, objectively, the only possible portmanteau of Harvey and Legora. We just thought it was too good not to build a website around.

What we shipped

One logo mark. One wordmark. One favicon. One colour palette. One afternoon. Then we went for elevenses.

The full visual identity — including the four trim levels we tested but ultimately rejected — is documented on our internal logo test page, which we have accidentally left publicly accessible. Our security team has been notified. They are scheduling a meeting to discuss scheduling a review.

This is an April Fools' Day post by r/legaltech. The Hargora brand does not exist. Legora's actual brand identity is the work of talented designers and we think it looks great. We just couldn't resist the H.