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Case Study: Designing a New Logo

What goes into developing a new typographic logo? Where do you start? How do you know what works and what doesn't? Follow along as the company Extensis refreshes its branding with a new logotype.
Written by Thomas Phinney on April 2, 2012
Average: 4.6 (8 votes)

Categories: Fonts, Marketing, Type Design, Typography, Features

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Developing a new logo for an established brand is always a tricky thing. You want to present a fresh to the prospective clients without alienating or confusing your current customers. Extensis, the company that produces the font-management application Suitcase Fusion, recently decided to replace its dated logo with one that's more in step with what its customers have come to expect from the company creative thinking, type expertise, and technical know-how. Thomas Phinney, who is "Guru of Fonts and Typography" at Extensis, worked with teams inside and outside the company to develop the new wordmark, or logotype. In this blog post Thomas describes the decision-making process of developing the typography in the new Extensis logo. You'll see what the options were, how ideas evolved, which fonts were rejected and what became the final solution. Thanks to Thomas and Extensis for letting us use this material.

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""Your logo is not your brand.'"

"Well, of course it's not! We all know that. However, we also know that it can communicate volumes. At Extensis, we have additional considerations here: If you are in our business selling to creative Privacy Information teams and font enthusiasts then the logo typography we choose will clearly communicate more to our audience (on a conscious level) than most other companies' logos communicate to their audience. In short: our audience knows their stuff, they are smart and discriminating. And yes, they are just about as opinionated as I am. Touch." Extensis Marketing VP Amanda Paull This leapt out from the many other options:

"Wow, Amanda. That's wild," I said. She had just given me my first look at this proposed (typo)graphical element of the new Extensis logo. It was just one option, and not even the one being pushed most heavily by our friends at Blue Collar Agency who were helping our re-branding effort. They had in turn roped in their friends at Owen Jones & Partners. Mark Rawlins from OJP, along with Simon Walker had come up with this thing, that I promptly dubbed the "e-head." It was an "e" for Extensis, but it could also spawn comic-book word balloons. In fact, the first treatments had the Extensis wordmark being "spoken" by the head, like this.

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In retrospect, I think that the angle of the sides of the speech balloon being just slightly off from the angle of the italics was one of the reasons these didn't work for me. "I need some time to think about that e-head graphic," I told her. "Can I get back to you tomorrow after I sleep on it?" She agreed, and I went off to ponder whether something this radical and arguably lighthearted would work for our brand. It couldn't be further from the old logo:

I looked back over the feedback Amanda had gathered during the branding survey Blue Collar had done for us. "Should be simple. Doesn't have to be over the top."

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"I think we need a bit more kitschiness. Modern, slab serif perhaps." "They should use something with a no-nonsense quality, to give the sense of dependability and technology." "But it should have a twist, to give the sense of creativity as well." Well, the e-head certainly fit the bill on those counts. Perhaps except the "over the top" part. Having the wordmark spoken by the head in a dialog balloon probably met that. But if we just stuck with the e-head by itself? Simpler, and any over-the-topness came from the sensibility it conveyed, not from being overly-complex or too "busy." Then there were the directives arrived at for the branding redesign. As mentioned a couple posts back in this series, we wanted to communicate that Extensis: Loves type Is open and approachable Respects design tradition while progressing forward Takes our work and our customers, but not ourselves, seriously Well, the e-head certainly communicated open, approachable, and not taking ourselves too seriously. As I looked at it more, the more convinced I became that as long as we balanced it just right with a typographic treatment of the "Extensis" name, this could work just fine. Maybe it would be a little bit polarizing, and some people would hate it. But I thought they would at least notice it, remember it, and maybe even talk about it. Yet over time it would just become comfortably familiar. The next day I made an impassioned plea in favor of the e-head (though not necessarily the wordmark-in-the-word-balloon). Amanda and other marketing folks bought it. We explored other approaches as well, but we focused more and more on what typographic treatment to give to "Extensis" that could pair with the e-head. The setting needed to be a bit less silly and playful than the e-head, so as to counter-balance it a little. But if it got too serious it would just clash instead of complementing. Trying to find the right balance was tricky. Some more wordmarks in word balloons we tried:

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But outside of a word balloon approach, they had also shown us two treatments with all-caps slab serifs, Rodeqa and Donnerstag. Two weights of Rodeqa Slab 4F by Sergiy Tkachenko:

Donnerstag by Jeremy Dooley:

Rodeqa is a unicase font, but I looked at a lowercase version of the Donnerstag. There were things I liked about Donnerstag, but essentially I just wasn't happy with how a lot of the lowercase letters were drawn. It seemed very inconsistent, in that contrast between thick and thin strokes varied wildly from letter to letter. Doubtless it was a deliberate design decision on Dooley's part, but it didn't work for me.

Somewhere in here we agreed that lowercase was better. Not quite as formal and stuffy, I thought. So Rodeqa dropped out of the running. Then I started suggesting other typefaces. A few of my thoughts Museo Slab 300 by Jos Buivenga:

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Vista Slab Light by Xavier Dupr:

Adelle Light by Veronika Burian & Jos Scaglione:

Still, nothing was quite working. Amanda and I spent half an hour going over all the options I'd tried to date, and identifying what we liked and didn't like about each of them. Finally I went back to Amanda and said, "Give me a day or two to work with some letterforms myself and I can make something we will like. I'll start with Adelle, because it is just so darned well drawn, and modify it until it meets our needs."

I started by interpolating a custom weight, roughly mid-way between the regular and the semibold. In my experiments was about as light as I could go and still have the letters hold up nicely even when the logo was really small. I made the letters quite a bit wider (and thus a bit more rounded), not just by stretching them that would distort the shapes but as real designed extended letters. (I got some help from RMX Tools, which I used to add a width axis in >a href="http://www.fontlab.com/" target="_blank">FontLab Studio.) After that, I modified the shapes quite a bit. The treatment of the x was inspired by Xavier Dupr's Vista Slab. Lopping off the left part of the t crossbar made it seem more modern and also helped with what would otherwise be awkward spacing between the x and the t. I also lopped off the inner right serif of the n (like Donnerstag or Palatino), and then I had to make the n a tad narrower to compensate for the missing interior serif. I gave the s more playful ball terminals (like Donnerstag or Archer [by Hoefler & Frere-Jones]). Although I had messed with it a lot, the great underlying craftsmanship in Vik and Jos's letterforms gave me a great base. Now the whole thing was a bit more jaunty and modern, compatible with the e-head without being quite as extreme.

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Soon we began to roll it out internally. The first showing was just the wordmark without the e-head. In retrospect not such a good idea. But a few months later we showed it with the e-head, and regular human heads started to nod. They could see what I was balancing the wordmark against. Last week it went up on signs at our downtown Portland headquarters.

Every time I look at it I like it more. That's a good feeling. But I will be very interested to hear what outside folks think of it!

Read previous posts about the decision-making processes behind the Extensis rebrand: 1. When is it Time for a Rebrand? 2. Diving into the Icy Cold Waters of a Brand Refresh 3. Brand Refresh: Getting the Gang Onboard
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