Introduction
Every company needs a logo. Many need multiple over the course of their lifespan, or multiple for different products. It’s an important graphic for any business. Unfortunately, it all too frequently does not get the time and effort that it deserves. A startup will hop on Fiver and pay some random guy $5 for some flashy logo that may or may not have been recycled or stolen. But logos should tell a story of the product or company’s purpose or function. They should be flexible just like startups have to be in a fast-paced and changing business environment. It should be distinguishable at any size or color for what it is. That is the only way a company ends up with a logo that will stand the tests of time and serve a logo’s purpose — an icon that convey’s a company’s message to customers and potential customers alike for years.
In the beginning…
The team convenes to discuss the assignment, purpose, and goals. UpGuard was developing a two-product offering involving a vendor risk and a configuration management product.
The vendor risk product’s premise is an app that provides an assessment of a vendor’s potential cyber risk to your company. It scans websites, APIs and collects data, aggregating that information to display an instant, in-depth report that gives a user an overall score of the vendor’s risk as well as detailing where and how the company could improve. It’s like a credit report for your cyber security.
The other product focused on configuration management and compliance, continuously monitoring all of a company’s digital surfaces for unauthorized change or misconfiguration, reducing outages and time spent fire fighting.
A review time and date was set, and the designers splintered to start the sketching phase, working out some rough ideas on our own.
Let the sketching begin!
The sketching phase is for ideating, sketching quickly and in volume. During the sketching phase, I like to sit down, put on my “Focus” playlist and just rock out. I jot down some keywords or notes about the project and then sketch away.
Good and bad ideas fly. I like to sketch small and fast, not worrying about duplications or similarities. Themes start to develop as I refine logos that tell the story I want to convey.
In this case, my goal for Configuration & Compliance was to illustrate validating or understanding change, comparing and scanning elements, searching for chinks in the armor.
For Cyber Risk, I thought about providing data to shield from a bad link joining their vendor chain, leaving them exposed to that vendor’s risk.
Those were the stories I was trying to tell.
Reviewing the concepts
Next step is to come together as a team to review. Because logos are something that should be identifiable and convey a message at a glance, no explanation was given for our various ideas at the outset. We all hung our sketches and, using green stickers, marked the ones we liked.
After allowing people to study and consider the logos, we discussed the ideas that we illustrated, what we were going for, what was working and what wasn’t, and why we liked some and not others.
The team now went to their computers to further develop the logo ideas as vectors. Sometimes logos look better as rough sketches than they do as crisp, clean vector images. It also allows us to play with the precision of Illustrator, changing the details like spacing and stroke weight.
Vector Review
Again, we hung up our logo iteration. This time, the team invited key stakeholders and passers-by to drop green stickies on the logos they liked and talk out what made them successful.
After some discussion and debate, the team came up with three logo pairings to pursue in the next round, assigning each pair to a different designer to develop further.
In living color
The task now was to refine the logos and see how they played with copy, color, at varying sizes and side-by-side. We each tweaked our assigned logos and laid them out in the same way. Now it was review time again.
The final review
With the layouts printed and hung up in our Creative Corner, we started the final review. Again, key stakeholders and colleagues were invited (sometimes forced) to participate. Bringing others into the process gives them some ownership of it, starting the socializing process before the logo is even fully developed.
We discussed and debated the strengths and limitations of each, contemplating how they might be perfected and compared to others. At long last we came to a decision, agreeing unanimously on one and to push the other to match but still be distinguishable.
Final touches
Given my attention to detail and expertise with Illustrator, the final development and touches fell to me. The dark blue Cyber Risk logo was pretty much done, and the new Config/Compliance logo was a mashup of other ideas and Cyber Risk logo. The goal here was measure spacing, sizing, and stroke weights between logos to make sure they paired pixel-perfectly. Et voila! Consistent, well paired and flexible but story-telling logos achieved.
Conclusion
The process was a long one but fun. A logo should be a team effort, one that everyone can be happy with at the end of the project. Not only are multiple heads (and designers) better than one for coming up with the best ideas and working out kinks (like what the founders will interpret as looking too much like a boob or penis), but involving others makes the process of championing and socializing the logos much easier. Just as the best process is the one you actually use, the best logo is the one that the company can get behind.
Unfortunately, although we came to two product logos, a company shift at the end of the process made the logos unnecessary, but something I’ve learned in design is never delete anything — in some form, some day it may come in handy. If the company ever comes back around to these in some fashion, we’ll be ready with two solid logos!