I swapped the icon this week. Not the name, not the product, not what PayGlue does or how much it costs. One image, replaced everywhere it lives: the favicon, the dashboard, the emails, this blog, the docs, even the public repo. If you blinked you might not have noticed. If you’re the kind of person who notices favicons, here’s the story.
What the old one was trying to say
The original icon was two overlapping rings with a bar running through the middle, sitting on a solid purple square. The idea behind it was reasonable: two circles coming together is a decent shorthand for “connecting two things,” and PayGlue’s entire job is connecting Ghost to a payment provider. The bar in the middle, with a little pill shape inside it, was meant to read as a plug.
It worked at the size you’d design it at. It stopped working at the size people actually see it: a 16 pixel browser tab, a 28 pixel email header. Two overlapping circles, one of them at reduced opacity, plus a bar, plus a pill, is four shapes competing for very few pixels. Squint at it small enough and it stops reading as anything, just a purple square with some white in it.
Where the new one came from
I didn’t set out to redesign the PayGlue mark. I was redoing the branding on an internal tool first, a project tracker I self-host, and building that icon around a much simpler idea: a ring that doesn’t quite close, with a small diamond marking the exact spot where it opens, and a dot sitting at the center. One continuous stroke instead of four stacked shapes. It held up at small sizes in a way my own icon never did, and once I’d stared at both side by side for a week, using the old icon for PayGlue stopped feeling like an option.
The part I didn’t plan
Here’s the accident. A ring that doesn’t close has a gap in it by construction, and I’d put the diamond right at that gap on purpose, as a kind of marker: this is the measurement point, this is where the angle was taken. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything beyond that.
I’m part of a small community of other solo founders, mostly people building and running their own tools without a team behind them, and the icon came up one evening while we were talking about dev tools and ticketing systems. Somebody looked at it and said the obvious thing out loud: a circle with a piece missing, and a marker sitting exactly in the missing piece, is a pretty good drawing of what PayGlue actually does. Ghost’s own billing is a closed loop only if you’re on Stripe. For everyone else, there’s a real, literal gap between “somebody paid” and “Ghost knows about it.” PayGlue is the piece that sits in that gap. Not the whole circle, just the part that was missing.
I didn’t design that in. I noticed it afterward, the way you notice a word contains a smaller word once someone points it out. But once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it, and it’s a better explanation of the product than anything I’d have come up with on purpose.
What actually changed, concretely
Everything, once, in one pass, rather than gradually:
- Favicon and app icons across the dashboard
- The icon in every transactional and lifecycle email
- This blog’s nav, its social preview image, and the marketing site
- The public docs and the open-source repo’s own README
One bug came out of doing it all at once that’s worth mentioning, because it’s a more honest story than “I made a pretty icon.” The old icon carried its own dark background square everywhere, including inline next to the wordmark. That’s fine on a white page. On a dark sidebar or a dark email header, a dark square sitting on a dark background just disappears, and what’s left is worse than either version alone. I ended up with two forms of the mark: a version with its own dark backing for places that need to stand alone, like a favicon or an app icon tile, and a transparent version with nothing but the gradient stroke for everywhere the icon sits inline next to text. Small thing, but it’s the difference between the icon looking intentional on a dark page and looking like a rendering bug.
What didn’t change
The name. The pricing. The eight providers. The person writing this blog, still just me. If you’ve got PayGlue running on a Ghost site right now, nothing about how it behaves is different, only the little square in your browser tab. I’m not repositioning anything, I just found an icon that finally says what I’ve been trying to say for three years, and it happened by accident.