How we designed our logo

What branding early brings to the game

Although most often overlooked, the branding design is crucial to a company or product’s success, since it binds both together and allows for a feeling of excellence at the beginning of a journey that can only improve.

A lot of start-ups have a great product since the beginning, but they sometimes fail when it comes to giving that product an image that can be remembered.

Branding design done right can bring the team behind the company together and can set the values that will stay along for the journey, as well as elevate the tech behind the product and improve the users’ experience as a whole.

What’s the best way to have your brand respected than to build that respect from the start?

Let me show you how we did it at Oraculi.

Why new branding?

When I joined, it became apparent we needed to build the brand before our official launch and we needed to bring consistency to our platforms, Komiser and Oraculi, so we decided to prioritize the identity design.

We built Oraculi’s identity to reflect our values, our mission, and our people (both the team and the users). The result derived from dedication, feedback, and aiming for finesse. Launching with the new design allowed us to strike a powerful image into people’s minds and to present our products and mission with a design that resonated with our tech and team.

No time to lose…

with company values!

To begin this process, we decided to ask our team a few questions through a short form. These questions were mostly related to how we would define our essence and goal (this is important to set the tone for the branding) and how we see ourselves and the company growing in the future (this is to ensure the branding will be scalable in the future).

Everyone on the team gave out their answers and we created a word cloud to help visualize what were the keywords that would help define Oraculi. The word cloud takes the most used words and highlights them visually through bigger text sizes.

As you can see, some expressions and ideas are crucial to our brand, such as cloud, DevOps, building, and platform.

This helped inspiration flow into the next step of this design process: a 1h challenge of hand drawing simple sketch logos.

with sketches!

Even though some of these ideas were too straightforward and simple, it’s important to go through them to reach more complex and meaningful concepts.

From here, the best concepts were selected so they could be worked on digitally.

They were shared with the team and everyone got the chance to pick the ones that showed potential to be further elaborated, with me as the lead designer explaining my thoughts behind each one and highlighting the possibilities of how the concepts could grow.

with digital proposals!

The digital experimentation phase began and things started to gain a bit more direction. Playing with shapes, colors, and typography, logos began to form and the critique became more focused.

Some of these initial ideas fused together or gave out elements to build new concepts, which is always one of my favorite parts of designing. How a poor idea can become the stepping stone for another to become brilliant is the key behind experimenting and not staying locked under an initial concept.

An example of this is the modular approach we explored for Oraculi. Even though we decided not to take this direction, the font created from the DevOps infinity symbol became our main original font – Infinitus.

This font is still being fully designed, as we want to do more with it in the future, but the initial appliance has been made and was extremely successful.

While going through all the most voted concepts, one rose up to become something besides a logo, but still, an element that is crucial for our branding – a mascot.

with a mascot!

One of the questions in the initial questionnaire was “What would Oraculi be if it were an animal” and there was a common answer that sparked our interest. The beaver is a hard-working animal, focused on bettering the ecosystem and supporting their species and others. This resonated with everyone who wrote about our essence and it’s said that associating an animal with a company or product helps the users create a more personal connection, so it was definitely something worth exploring.

I’m not an illustrator, so it became clear that we would need support from an artist for the next steps of the mascot (something we might cover next in another blog post). However, the beaver presence could still be explored in our logo.

with the chosen concept!

Our main references for our logomark were the Oraculi’s O, the cycle of DevOps, and the beaver’s tail (their tool to build) and they all came through on the final design.

After getting feedback on my experimentation, the team chose a direction to focus on and I began the refinement process of the logo, as well as the design of alternative versions for it.

During this refinement process, the colors owned some of the spotlight and I began experimenting with palettes and color symbolism. We explored mostly nature-inspired colors and tech/luxury-related ones, as both ideas could connect with our message. We also explored the dark mode approach for our branding, as it made sense for the young and tech feel we wanted to convey.

The typography to be used on the logo was considered, as at this point it was still not clear whether we wanted to go with the Infinitus font. Typography is one of my main passions and is a very important element of branding design, as legibility and the shape of the font can communicate a whole different tone from the intended one.

The strokes on the logomark were adjusted, the design of the beaver’s tail was also refined, the colors were chosen and applied and the typography joined in to create our final logo.

with the branding guidelines!

But a brand is not made of only a logo, it is merely a part of the puzzle.

The next step was to create the branding guidelines for Oraculi, to be used both internally and by future collaborators. This document is extremely important, as it preserves the brand as it was designed and clears up common questions on usage and meaning behind the elements.

Surrounded by Oraculi’s values

The most important part of this design journey was, in my opinion, the involvement of the team.

There are a lot of moments when decisions have to be made by designers alone, as they require their expertise and knowledge to bear fruit.

However, there are moments when outside feedback is very welcome in the designing process and can be important to break through decisions.

Besides this, when building a brand, the designer is representing not only the company, the product, and the mission but also the team behind it. Every person who is building this vision will need to feel a connection to how their work is being presented.

Because of this, it was vital for me to involve everyone in the team in the design decisions that made sense. And not only did it work, but it was also a beautiful experience.

The feedback loop was engaged and everyone knew of the progress that was being made on the brand. From what I gathered, it was amazing to not only see the progress but to be a part of it, as everyone’s voices felt heard. It also felt like everyone left a piece of them on the brand, which is something I could only admire.

Conclusion

Oraculi’s branding is an ongoing project that will be growing and adapting to the company as time goes on, but it has its roots well set in our beginning.

Hopefully, you found this design journey and tips helpful.

In the end, investing in start-up branding is one of the best decisions to be made, since it elevates the product’s quality and supports the promotion of the brand-new vision.

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