The Brand

This was a really fun one.

For this project, I worked with Sam Absalom over at AssetDigital to develop a fresh new logo for their brand.

AssetDigital is a domain name consultancy with a corporate focus.

Sam already had a pretty good idea of what he wanted in a logo, so that helped the design process move fairly quickly.

Concepts

When Sam and I had our first Discovery session, he laid out some specifics he wanted to see in his logo:

Clean, black text. Preferably Helvetica Bold or similar.
Logomark using the initials "AD" with the AssetDigital text beside it.
Logomark designed for presentation in color and one-color (which is pretty standard anyway).

Sam also mentioned that he really liked the style of the Polygon and Uniregistry logos, so I used those as inspiration.

Polygon

Uniregistry

Additionally, Sam expressed that he liked the look of a pixel gradient / "digital fade" and wanted to see it incorporated into at least some of the concepts for the AssetDigital Logo.

Pixel Gradient image courtesy of Shutterstock

The design process for this was trickier than I initially expected. Geometric logos are super popular, especially ones with a simple triangle mark, which meant that I had to be careful not to wind up making a derivative logo. I also opted to stick to black and white logos at first here, since I've started to find that adding colors during the conceptualization process can affect the design process negatively, since it draws your attention (and more importantly the client's) away from the design itself and more to the color. I've had a few clients give feedback on the concepts asking to see designs in different colors, which is fine - but doesn't do either of us a lot of good since ultimately this phase is just about picking a design.

For this first round of concepts, I really ony liked #3 and #7. #1 seemed to work well for the brand, but reminded me of something you would see as a logo for a long-haul trucking company. #7 was loosely based around the shape of the "AD" mark (half triangle for A pushed up against half triangle for D), but I was worried it was too similar to Polygon. #2, 4, & 5 I thought had potential, but would have to be significantly reworked if we were going to move forward with them.

I sent the concepts off the Sam and we moved into the next phase of conceptualizing. We decided to move away from the triangle logo and stick more closely with the "AD" marks. Sam really liked #5, but I needed to make it look less like a cartoon tongue (my words, not his). He also wanted to see more of the pixel gradient incorporated into the concepts, which leads us to Round 2:

Pixel Gradient on the Classic AD Mark, thickened up the lines on the "tongue," tweaked the not-Polygon logo a bit more, and tried a simple pixel gradient just on the AD to get a feel for it. Sam chose #2 and wanted to see it with some gradient options. We also locked down the text formatting at this stage, opting to forgo the Small Caps in favor of traditional text. I also made the mistake of including a space in between "Asset" and "Digital" like some kinda jabroni, so I took those out at this stage too.

Sam chose Door Number 3 in this Showcase Showdown, so it was time to add some color and start making this logo even prettier.

Typeface

Typeface on this project was really simple. Sam already knew he wanted to stick with Helvetica Bold in black - to match the corporate look that he liked. Saved time on this step, but also meant that the design would have to be designed around the font, not the other way around. Fortunately, Helvetica is very clean and simple, so I didn't run into any issues like I may have if Sam decided he really liked the look of Viner Hand ITC.

In case you forgot what Helvetica looks like.

Colors

Colors! This is the fun part. Sam really liked the blue that I use in my own logo, so I found him a couple bright blue options (#1 & 3). He also specified he wanted to see a version in a mint green (and was nice enough to provide the exact color he wanted to see: #1ecd97).

For the gradients, I hopped over to visit my new favorite color resource (shout out to coolors.co anyway though): gradients.io, a curated collection of beautiful gradients from designer Luke Davies. I chose three gradients that I really liked, and then eventually made one of my own, based off the "New Leaf" gradient, but using Sam's mint green instead of the darker blue-green in the original:

Sam really liked the minty green gradient, so I moved onto the final lockup.

Lockup

All the cool kids on Dribbble will tell you that you need to make a cool lockup showing your design process and ratios, or else they'll beat you up and take your lunch money.

The more astute observer will notice that this lockup looks like it was made by a kindergartner. I am aware. In the words of Frank Reynolds:

Final Thoughts

So what did we learn from this?

No color is better for initial logo concepts, because it forces you and the client to focus on the actual design.
Helvetica is really easy to work with.
People on Dribbble make fun of you if your logo lockup looks bad.

Cool stuff below. ∎

Validate my existence:

Brand Image 01

Brand Image 02

The Brand

In this case study, I'm going to walk step-by-step through the creative process behind the development of the new logo and brand identity for Kaffein.

Kaffein is a software development company [that is] primarily focused on mobile and custom Integrations.

Twitter / GitHub / Website

I was approached by Amir from Kaffein about designing a logo for his brand in a similar vein to the logo I designed for East Rising Media back in December. He liked the "simple but elegant" style and wanted to see if we could leverage a similar look for Kaffein's brand identity.

When Amir first contacted me, he knew he wanted a logo that drew inspiration from 2 things: the letter K - which makes his brand name distinct - and coffee, the lifeblood that fuels the dreams of champions.

This is the logo that Amir was using at the time he contacted me:

The previous logo for Kaffein

It looks nice, but there's a lot to be improved. Most notably, it looks too much like a logo for a coffee shop. It captures the essence of "Caffeine" the substance, but not of "Kaffein" the software company.

The Concepts

I played a lot with Amir's ideas, trying to find simple and clean icons that use the coffee mug or simple software-related glyphs to create the look of the K that I liked. As you can see from these sketches, some ideas were good, and plenty were far from (most notably the abominations on the right that look like if the lamp from Aladdin were mixed with some sort of alligator).

But that's the point of the conceptualization process - to separate the good from the bad and find the ideas that are truly worth developing.

After deliberation, I chose the following 7 concepts to clean up and send to Amir. At this point, my personal favorite was #6. It had the cool hipster icon look, and I thought it would look sweet on a hat. #1 and #2 (along with #6) were my attempts at more abstract versions of the "K" symbol - capturing the "essense" of the letter moreso than the letter itself. This was a concept I really liked, but the feedback I got on these from some designer friends taught me a pretty important lesson here: No matter how cool you think your design looks, if people can't tell what it's supposed to be, the design has failed its purpose.

You'll notice that at this point I also included some possible font pairings - but I'll get to those in a minute.

Amir and his team decided that they liked Designs 6 & 7 the best.

At this point, I honestly wasn't too sold on #7, but as any creative will tell you- you can't let yourself become attached to your favorite designs; sometimes you have to be ready to kill your darlings (which is what happened here).

Of the 8 options here, Amir and his team settled on design #2 - which I had actually started to grow quite fond of myself.

Typeface

Quick sidebar about font choice:

Along with the logo concepts, I had also chosen three fonts that I thought represented the brand well and fit with the logos without being too distracting.

Gotham and Young were two simple sans-serif fonts, and Florencesans was a little more out-there with it's extended "f" glyphs.

I eventually settled on Florecnesans as the primary font because it had quite a bit more character than the other two. I also liked how the extended "f"s evoked an image reminiscent of the "steam lines" from a few of the original logo concepts. Ultimately, I chose Avenir Roman as the companion font. It was similar in shape/style and I thought it complemented Florencesans nicely. (Gotham seemed a bit large/round, and Young was just a little too stylish/distracting for my tastes.)

I put together a color palette from the original colors I got from Amir using Coolors.co, probably one of the most useful tools I've found online. It lets you build color palettes from certain colors and make quick modifications. My favorite difference between Coolors and similar palette builders (Adobe Kuler, etc) is the ability to lock certain colors into your palette and then have Coolors pick additional colors to add to your Palette that look nice together. This is super handy when you have 2-3 colors and you need some inspiration for 1-2 more. Plus the Coolors interface is super simple and intuitive. (Plus all the colors are named, which is just fun when you can pitch color variations like "Aero" and "Azure Mist" to a client instead of "Okay so I have like 3 blues for you to choose from.")

And here's the final logo at the end of the design process. Clean, simple, elegant, professional. Plus very easy to convert to single-color for applicatiions where that's necessary.

The Animation

I wound up pitching 3 different animation concepts to Amir.

The first, which I nicknamed "Gravity," was loosely inspired by the Pixar logo animation. Cartoon-ish easing on the animation of the "ball," breaking the logo apart, and landing quickly. I thought it was a cute take on the logo.

Logo Concept #1 - "Gravity"

The second logo concept - "Velocity" - was a bit of a variation on the "Gravity" concept, but in a slightly less cartoonish way. This is also the only animation of the 3 that contains motion blur - which I felt added to the feeling of speed from the "ball". This concept still used the breaking apart of the original shape, but with a more "atomic" vibe.

Logo Concept #2 - "Velocity"

Option #3 - "Revolve": the version Amir decided to go with. With this one I stepped away from breaking apart the mug and just spun it in. This version definitely drives home the mug imagery, and there's probably some psychological benefit to not having the "shatter" subtext of the first two. I really like how the 2.5D turned out, giving it the look of a 3D mug without any shading or 3D work. The lambda / "K" (I know it doesn't look like a K) were just put into an AE Comp with an extended left light blue edge, masked to the mug's shape, and position animated to the right to match the "ball", which is animation on a curved motion path (with some change in Z space to move it in front of the mug - so I guess it's not ENTIRELY without 3D, but all done within AE).

Logo Concept #3 - "Revolve"

Final Thoughts

Overall, I'm thrilled with how this came out, and Amir and his team were super happy with the final product.

From a design standpoint, I certainly learned a lot of good lessons (some obvious - some less so), which I'll try to summarize here as a TL;DR:

Don't get super attached to any of your design concepts because those are always the ones that get the ax.
Abstract logos may impress your design friends on Dribbble, but if people can't immediately tell what it is, it's not a good concept for a logo.
Choosing fonts is always harder than you think it will be.

I went ahead and mocked up some cool brand/stock images (courtesy of Unsplash) with the Kaffein logo and I'm stoked to see where Amir and the Kaffein team go next! ∎

Validate my existence: