Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
Making of Augment Intelligence Branding
Right before the end of last year Richard MacManus, founder of tech blog ReadWrite, approached me with asking a quote for a branding project. He was about to start a new newsletter, titled Augment Intelligence and needed a logo plus related social media headers for Twitter, Facebook and Google+. I was interested and we got fast into an agreement about the project.
To get the project started and to find out what Richard was expecting from the logo and the headers I asked a couple of questions. I had already a basic idea of what Augment Intelligence was about, and based on it could guess the answers to most of my questions. However I wanted to make sure we were on the same page, so I asked nevertheless. According to Richard's answers, he wished for digital (not handmade) style and mainly text based logo with a cool font. He also threw in an idea of a simple graphic, such as a simplified brain. As it came to colouring, Richard was already using a deep red and suggested a darker colour, such as charcoal as a pair for it.
I started the design work immediately, concentrating to two things: Finding the right font, which would be the whole basis of this text based logo and coming up with an idea of how to use the words in the logo. As Richard mentioned, the words Augment and Intelligence are pretty self-explanatory. Due to this I wanted to find a font which would be clear and easy to read, with futuristic feeling and would fit the idea of "smart" technology. I went with a simple testing process, trying different fonts. I searched through my font library, and checked both free and paid fonts all around web. I noticed I could use the letter g in the words as a sort of a decorative element, so I started to pay more attention in the g's in the fonts I was testing. Another letter that turned out to be important was the A in the beginning of the title.
I tested different ways to write Augment Intelligence. Written in one line it appeared very long and I started to work towards a two-line logo. I also tried emphasising Aug and Intel, since Richard had registered augintel.com and associated social media handles. One of my trials included using different font or different capitalisation for each word. However I soon noticed that because the appearance of the words, including the length of the word Intelligence, all these emphasising methods made the text look busy. So I told myself to simplify, simplify. I also decided to take a spin on the idea of implementing a small graphic in the logo, especially since I was now settled with the two-line presentation of the words. Since the word Augment is shorter than Intelligence, there seemed to be a natural place for a simple icon right next to it. Following Richard's mention about a brain, I created a little vector outline of a brain with some lines in it as an artistic representation of neural pathways. I felt the icon was a bit too detailed, but I went back on finding the right font. With the icon included, it became clear that the font should be very simple, yet somehow organic. Fonts with sharp edges didn't work out.
At the end of all this testing I found a font which felt right from the beginning. It has similarities to the font Richard was already using for the headings at his main site and blog. The font I found is simple with nice a looking capital A and small case g, and it has a futuristic and technological feeling. The font is called Exo 2 and it is designed by Natanael Gama. I decided to see how Richard feels, so I sent a draft of the logo to him. I pointed out that this is a work in process and I wanted to hear his thoughts about the overall idea. I included three colour versions. The main logo would be with dark grey text and the brain icon in "Ricmac deep red". The additional versions would be in all dark grey, all red and, for dark backgrounds, all white.
Richard liked the overall idea, but felt unsure about the details of the brain logo. He wished it to be simpler. I agreed. To balance the text out I did little font resizing and repositioned the texts. For the next draft I made a slightly simpler version of the icon, but Richard was still unsure about it.
He had dug up a couple of vector brain icons and suggested trying one of them on the logo. The vector icon he suggested was nice (Brain by OliM from the Noun Project shared and used under CC BY), but it was slightly too "curvy" for this logo, as I put it in my next email to Richard. I did a draft including said vector (in the following image the second one), but also a draft with my own take on the same basic idea (in the following image the first one).
Richard agreed with my assessment about the brain icons. He liked the new simplified version and left any further tweaks to my "expert eye" to finalise.
I had decided to leave the design of the headers to when the logo was finalised, so I could create the headers around the logo. Unfortunately, at that stage, I was slightly drained of ideas. Per usual my creative process was all about experimenting. Thus I tried different things, which didn't quite work. There were different types of grids, presenting the smart tech and pathways. I even tried a quite detailed, web sort of creation. Again it became clear to me that I needed to simplify. As an effort of simplifying I created a quite minimalistic, honeycomb illustration with dark grey elements and one red element. I wanted the rest of the header to reflect the logo. The honeycomb design didn't quite feel like it, but I wanted to show something to Richard, in order to hear what he had in mind. So I sent it out asking what he liked about it, and what he didn't.
Richard pointed out what I was already thinking: The geometric shape of the cells didn't match the more organic shapes of the font and the brain icon. But he also liked where I was heading with the design, the one red element as finding the signal in the noise and so forth. He also agreed with my initial thought about minimalism. Luckily Richard was also able to unstuck me by giving me a couple of ideas of simple brainwaves. I took that idea and created a draft of a header with sorts of brain waves. I kept the one red element (in this case one red line) as presenting the signal within the grey noise. Richard liked the draft, so I gave it final touches. I fixed some crude edges in the waves and emphasised the effect I had created in the draft, where all the waves started as more distorted and ended flowing into a harmony and unity.
It was great to work with Richard on this project and I feel good about the outcome. From my point of view, the logo represents the whole idea of Augment Intelligence and the headers complement the logo nicely. The brain icon became to have more emphasis, as it became also an avatar for Augment Intelligence social media profiles. For this purpose I created a couple of different colour versions, of which we agreed the one with white on red background was a nice, sort of uplifting touch to the profiles. Richard has also noted his contentment with the logo, icon and the headers, as well as working with me. As he put it, the back and forth creative process was something to appreciate. I'm very happy to see the Augment Intelligence logo and the headers in use.
Augment Intelligence at Twitter
Augment Intelligence at Facebook
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