The final logo as it exists today
Back in 2016, DADI web services had reached a level of maturity that led to a focus on broadening our market appeal (and thinking about development of cloud services). Our brand was refreshed to reflect this ambition and we thought we’d share some of the development work that led to the 'D' identity we use today.
There were a plethora of visual metaphors around modular, interconnected elements relevant to the microservices concept core to our development philosophy, so this was a good place to start.
We quickly settled on using equilateral triangles to represent the building blocks of the platform – reforming them into different shapes to represent different elements the way using combinations of the web services creates a variations in site architecture:
A concept logo and some example applications for our Web and Publish products.
While we liked some of the applications (the Publish and Web lettering will look familiar), we felt we needed a stand-alone mark for the many differing applications that are required of a logo today - whether that’s an app icon, social media profile icon or a tiny favicon.
Revisiting the modular idea lead us to the concept of a 'plug' which symbolises the interconnectivity in the DADI stack – you can connect them to each other or to your existing technology to 'power' a better web. You can see some of the development below.
Concepts for ‘The D’.
During this exploration we stumbled upon this rotated power switch icon which fit nicely (pun intended) – it's a simple idea but hardly new. Adding the extra block it maintained the simplicity of the idea but now we could see clouds, speed, code and a gentle nod to recursion.
Refinements to the mark and testing the addition of type.
All that was left was some more refinements – tweaking the typeface, softening the corners, adjusting the thickness to resize more easily and finally adding some colour.
Rather than using a single block of colour we wanted to decided to use a background texture to add some depth. Delaunay triangles felt like a subtle twist to the more rigid equilateral triangles we used to start with and then DADI engineer, Magnus Dahlstrand, built a cool svg tool which generated dynamic patterns on the fly.
The most notable use of this pattern is on the business cards, where each individual is free to choose their pattern and colour scheme.
A sample of DADI business cards.
We’ll continue to evolve the brand around the logo as it needs to be applied to different mediums – who knows, maybe it will even appear on hardware very soon :)
The mark used in the command line.
Just for fun (or those needing more inspiration) here’s a few our our favourite of more developed concepts from the original design exploration.
Concept logos