After weeks and months…
…of struggling to come up with a name for Gociety (an entire blog post in itself), I embarked on the tortuous, tedious, eye-bleeding iterative process of designing the Gociety brand. Anyone that has designed a logo from the ground up will speak of endless hours behind a computer screen, and a battle for both clarity and creativity in the final product. And a war it was. I have a habit of flipping through design files for fun, and I recently stumbled upon the Gociety logo outtakes folder. I was reminded of the countless discussions and heated debates with the team, and wanted to share the process and thought behind our brand visuals with the community.
We covered a lot of territory — design snippets, shapes, iconography, typography, images, and even monkeys with sparkly eyes. Over the course of three solid months, the team explored many different styles. My strangest inspiration was found while looking at the wash care tags of a coat. There were a lot of cool symbols I thought could translate well somewhere. Needless to say, they ended up in the outtakes folder, but I still admire them.
We knew what we didn’t want—an overly earnest approach (and probably not a sparkle ape either). The branding had to be fun, young and clean. We had some fairly solid color choices early that we all liked, so I played with those first. The typographic execution was the bulk of our hangup. The style just wasn’t right.
Here’s a gallery of our early outtakes:
Another major design consideration was that the ‘go’ needed to be visually separate from the ‘ciety’ to give phonetic clues. People were having issues pronouncing the name, so I decided that it would be wise to use two typefaces in the logo.
The process was an interesting exploration of elements, but what really happened was serendipitous. There was a harmony that lined up and stuck. I wish I could say everything was calculated down to the millimeter, but that would be against my personal creative process. Leaving room for mistakes and failures is what leads to good design. Alas, a brand was born.
The final, team-approved design:
