Graphic Design
Once we got our concept agreed and a few technical architecture elements in place we began to work on a design for our web app. I started working on the User Interface (UI) whilst Ella our Graphic Designer made a start on some of graphical elements of the app including the logo and a temporary home page for the website.  This probably wasn’t an ideal approach in terms of the sequence of events, but Ella had a window in her schedule for a few days of work and we had made a conscious decision to start promoting the product during development – so it seemed reasonable to have some branding elements in place as soon as possible.

As part of our brief to Ella we emphasised the importance to us that the logo should be readily identifiable with both the Conduce brand and with other Conduce products.  I cited a number of software product families which had a similar theme running through them: Adobe Products have the product initials on a plain square background, 37Signals have a snow globe theme running through them and MS Office products are readily identifiable.  We had ruled out earlier the idea of just using the standard Conduce logo in a different colour.  As the Conduce logo is actually the net of a box Ella came up with the idea that the product logos should be an assembled box. We would then have a sub-logo representing the product either on or in the box.
The first stage design looked like this:
 
Here’s how Ella described the first stage of development: "I think the box is how we envisaged, with it being sketchy but modern at the same time! Ignore the icon colours (though I quite like them), my idea behind this is that it’s a tech ‘log’ which makes me think of a book of papers. I wanted to create something using shapes from aircraft that resembled pages of a book in an abstract way. I tried using the full aircraft shape but it got lost, so I narrowed it to the tail shape."

The idea of the glass box was good – but we didn’t feel it related directly with the Conduce box. If the box were opaque the correct colour of each Conduce division could potentially be used for individual products.  We were a little worried about how the glass box would render at low resolutions.  So a good start, but back to the drawing board.

The next stage of development saw all of the critique acted upon with a solid cube employing the Conduce Software colour scheme.  Although some of us liked the realistically rendered box colour it wasn’t loved by all of the development team.  In particular this design had much better results with a high resolution output compared to low resolution icons.
 
Tests of symbol ideas on the box proved more successful with a single colour or tone directly on the box rather than multiple colours in the box or on the box using some kind of icon or label.  The idea of a paper airplane was honed, improved and eventually made much less abstract.
The final design was reached after testing various box angles and shading options.

Next was to decide on a font style.  We had already agreed to use a combination of Georgia and Helvetica fonts for the website, the application and the mobile app, but we decided that the logo itself should use a contrasting font.  A relatively quick and simple selection exercise resulted in the unanimous choice of Berlin Sans font and colour combination.
 

As soon as the logo design was completed we put together a temporary holding page for the website and began incorporating the logo and its themes into our UI design and other branding elements.

Click here to read Part 1 of our Production Blog: Conception