Background
In the previous towhee identity, the product lead realized that the audience could not understand the specific identity and mission of Towhee from the logo, “It looked like a bird, that’s all.” The product owner said about the original logo, and with the upcoming official launch of Towhee, the product team is looking forward to a new, relevant visual identity.
For me there is no good or bad logo design, it is more important to meet its needs at a particular stage. I liked the previous design, especially the color. As a newly hired designer and team leader, I had to figure out what went wrong before.
What is Towhee？
Towhee is a super early and strategic product within zilliz. Its focus and goals may change in the future with a process of exploration, which may be why the initial logo design could not show the product’s identity.
During the communication with the product team, we learned that Towhee is going to build a platform that provides pipelines and models for AI applications. At the same time it expects to build an active community around users and developers to achieve a sustainable and rich pipeline expansion, and eventually make AI application development with low cost and low threshold, which is also the mission of our company zilliz.
Soon, we established the key objectives of the updated logo
1. The new logo aims to express the identity of towhee and establish relevance
2. Still maintain the bird’s identity, echoing the name, but probably not the priority
I just joined this company a few weeks ago and was asked to complete a logo and website update within a week. Due to the tight schedule, the design process was very agile. It sounds incredible, especially how to convince the new design and ensure that this result can win the test of time, and I would like to give some more details about the process.
Exploring logos
To get non-designers to agree with your design, the initial story of the design must come from them.
Our early sketch concepts revolved around the concept of models and combinations, and this combination of relationships in the form of puzzles, blocks, and other prototypes was already lying in the heads of product owners and getting alignment instantly. As our brand audience was developers, I will prefer building effective visual awareness with them rather than increasing the threshold of understanding with something new. This made the process of designing exploration solutions very focused.
Another takeaway is involving the product team in the sketch stage could be very helpful, provided they have a good understanding of what their product is doing. I believe their perspective provides a higher demand on the communication of graphics because they see visuals very directly and require graphics to be simple, direct, and efficient enough.
In the first two days, we had a few rounds of sketches about the symbol and I like to encourage team members to sketch on post-its so that everyone can discuss, create, modify and combine quickly. Eventually, some ideas were selected to go into the computer.
Our discussions and choices were in constant focus, and after discussions and votes, 3 birds survived till the third day and we started trying to add some colors.
When teams make final decisions, it is more helpful to provide some dimensions and principles than to tell them which one to choose.
The final symbol was designed to express a combination of blocks. The symbol conveys modulation, flexibility, and accessibility. As a platform of embedding a pipeline and an open-minded community, we believe that our contributors (from students to professional engineers) help shape who we are. The negative space of the graph is just combined into a bird which is towhee.
The choice of colors reflects the blocks’ identity and demonstrates the energy of a startup product. With an approachable color palette to attract the community of developers to connect with the product, it successfully reflects a friendly, co-creative environment.
Why lower-case
I chose lowercase letters in wordmarks continually, as well as the initial “t”, which feel humble and friendly. Only the letter “h” is higher will make the whole word more dynamic, also create a better visual balance when combined with the square logo mark.
Arvo is the core of the word mark, and there are some minor adjustments on the basis of this. As a free font, you can get Arvo in Google Fonts. Its serif details are brick style, which makes it feel modern and geeky rather than traditional ( love the x ), and echoes the geometric feel of the logo perfectly, a modular spirit that I hope to carry through consistently, as well as the landing page design.
Landing page design
As a new product launch site, towhee’s content is extremely limited. This will make the site very streamlined, we don’t want to exaggerate our product progress so far and provide false content instead, so keeping a real and humble personality is the key principle, so it was decided to provide only the most relevant information to the users and the scenarios we can offer at the moment, but more importantly, to introduce towhee, its identity, and mission, it is new! This is a good and important time to establish the initial impression of the brand.
The first screen is the soul of the site, and we were lucky to have the perfect tagline. The tagline is a very accurate representation of towhee’s mission, which is also very consistent with the new logo mark, so we extended the concept of building blocks into the tagline, and everything was very natural. The short, strong sentences ensured that this was feasible and blended perfectly.
Branded fonts have a unique personality but we also need to consider keeping the content with high readability. For instance, our engineers need to deep dive into technical documentation of Towhee in docs pages. So the website utilized a combination of the brand font Avro and the easy-to-read font Roboto.
The elements of the interface will be a bit different in mobile to better match the experience of smaller screens and mobile scenarios.
Although this site doesn’t have much content yet, I believe building a basic design system in the initial stage will make our work easier in the future.
The one-week project was challenging and exciting, the product was very early and the design team was very new. In addition to recognizing the design results, as a team lead, it was more important for me that the product team could participate and understand my design process. This will make our future cooperation more smooth and long-term. Towhee’s website was launched already, feel free to visit!
Thanks for your reading.
