Our New Brand Identity reflects its heart — literally | Part II

If you are here without reading the Part I to this article, you’ve missed some emotional touch to the revealing process of this logo. I get it; Some of you might be too broken inside that the mere word “emotional” is a bummer but try to give it a go — It’s not that emotional; I exaggerate sometimes. For those of you who’ve come here after reading the first part, thank you for respecting my efforts and reading all of my quarter-life-designer-crisis!

As I’ve listed out in Part I, our new brand identity would only satisfy my quest for a high standard if it does these things primarily:

• Demonstrate skill level in brand and logo design.
• Reflect the core thing about our personality.
• Be adaptive to different environments — digital screens, devices, platforms, etc.

1. How do I demonstrate my skill level elegantly?

I’ve decided to design a Geometric Golden ratio based Sans typographic logo! I told you I would get nerdy 😛.

Great design is achieved not when there’s nothing left to add, but It is achieved when there’s nothing left to remove.

Real professionalism is exhibited in groundedness. If we strip out all the unnecessary things and apply true skill and detail on the bare minimum required, it’ll always lead to something elegant and timeless.

Hence, I’ve decided that the logo is going to primarily be typographic. No funky business with abstract shapes; It needs to be Clearcut 😅.

Below’s a graphic demonstrating the use of Golden ratio (1.618) to construct the base grid for the type.

Constructing Golden Ratio based Grid for Clearcut logo

Extracting the letters from the Base Grid

Clearcut Logo — Extracting alphabets from the Base Grid

2. Now that the type’s finished, it was still missing something more — personality.

What separates us as a team? This was one of the many questions we spent time in the past few months trying to get clarity. And in the end we discovered this:

Lately, so many of our internal conversations revolved around Emotional Intelligence, Empathy, and Macro/Micro level perspective of our society. The more we questioned, “What separates us as a group of people?”, the more the answer pointed towards our higher than average Emotional Intelligence.

Ability to empathize is the reason we can be good at design, development, marketing or entrepreneurship. If we look past the skillset, the knowledge of tools, business, technology or the market, we discovered that emotional intelligence is the factor that gives us a true competitive advantage.

Emotional Intelligence is amazing and we can work to improve it. As we work on it, E.Q. sets off a chain reaction in our minds that lead to numerous positive things. But for the sake of sticking to the topic of this article, I’m pointing out one such positive thing that’s relevant for now— Higher E.Q leads to self-awareness; self-awareness leads to clarity over what makes you happy; And when you pursue work that’s making you happy, you’ll be able to able to pour your heart into it and give it everything you’ve got.

In a nutshell, without all the hippie talk — we really needed to add a heart shape to our logo and give it a life — pun intended. And obviously, I try not to make my designs lame. So that means I cannot add anything like this heart — ❤️, or this one — 🖤, because of two reasons — 1. We aren’t so cushy to qualify for a red heart and 2. We are not that emo to just add a black heart.

So after giving a good thought on how to inculcate a heart to this logo, we found an interesting opportunity to combine the most commonly used semi colon ';' in development with the most powerful tool in design — empathy.

So, our new logo has a heart formed out of a full stop and a comma — it’s a juxtaposition, it’s a micro rebellion, but more than anything it sums up our core personality!

So here it is...

A minimalistic logo that reflects our creative capability and also beautifully captures our personality that’s clearcut!

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