Clay Global rebrands the ‘Google for the semiconductor industry’

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.