In a very gutsy move, Grammarly is rebranding to Superhuman. I was definitely scratching my head when the company acquired the eponymous email app back in June. Why is this spellcheck-on-steroids company buying an email product?
Turns out the company has been quietly acquiring other products too, like Coda, a collaborative document platform similar to Notion, building the company into an AI-powered productivity suite.
So the name Superhuman makes sense.
Grace Snelling, writing in Fast Company about the rebrand:
[Grammarly CEO Shishir] Mehrotra explains it like this: Grammarly has always run on the “AI superhighway,” meaning that, instead of living on its own platform, Grammarly travels with you to places like Google Docs, email, or your Notes app to help improve your writing. Superhuman will use that superhighway to bring a huge new range of productivity tools to wherever you’re working.
In shedding the Grammarly name, Mehrota says:
“The trouble with the name ‘Grammarly’ is, like many names, its strength is its biggest weakness: it’s so precise,” Mehrotra says. “People’s expectations of what Grammarly can do for them are the reason it’s so popular. You need very little pitch for what it does, because the name explains the whole thing … As we went and looked at all the other things we wanted to be able to do for you, people scratch their heads a bit [saying], ‘Wait, I don’t really perceive Grammarly that way.’”
The company tapped branding agency Smith & Diction, the firm behind Perplexity’s brand identity.
Grammarly began briefing the Smith & Diction team on the rebrand in early 2025, but the company didn’t officially select its new name until late June, when the Superhuman acquisition was completed. For Chara and Mike Smith, the couple behind Smith & Diction, that meant there were only about three months to fully realize Superhuman’s branding.
Ouch, just three months for a complete rebrand. Ambitious indeed, but they hit a homerun with the icon, an arrow cursor which also morphs into a human with a cape, lovingly called “Hero.”
In their case study writeup, one of the Smiths says:
I was working on logo concepts and I was just drawing the basic shapes, you know the ones: triangles, circles, squares, octagons, etc., to see if I could get a story to fall out of any of them. Then I drew this arrow and was like hmm, that kinda looks like a cursor, oh wow it also kinda looks like a cape. I wonder if I put a dot on top of tha…OH MY GOD IT’S A SUPERHERO.
Check out the full case study for example visuals from the rebrand and some behind-the-scenes sketches.
