Beam Logo: from magic to the new decade progress

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BEAM Privacy

5 min readMar 9, 2020

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away… Wow, stop! It’s another story…

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud… it’s not that either.. although there seems to be something similar there…

Aha, Beam! That’s right =)

As a part of our series of articles about Beam evolution, let me share how the company visuals evolved. You might have noticed how our website www.beam.mw has been changed during the last 18 months. But now I want to tell you the story of the most recognizable element of our brand — the logo.

When most of our users hear “Beam”, they identify it with a prism. And this is absolutely true. But in the very beginning, Beam had a different vision of what should be the “Beam” brand. So let’s see how it started.

I — Harry Potter times ✨

In the first half of 2018, the word “Mimblewimble” was common enough in the crypto world. The Beam team selected the Mimblewimble protocol as a foundation for our blockchain. The Mimblewimble name naturally pushed the first version of our branding towards the Harry Potter theme.

Here we are, the first version of the logo with the ⚡️lightning ⚡️symbol, a long time before I joined Beam.

However, we create high-tech things, not a kind of magic or witchcraft. Time to level-up, stay tuned.

II — The dark side of the moon times 🌒

What associations come to your mind when you hear the word “Beam”? “Beam” as a construction block? “Beam” like a drink? “Beam” like a ray of light? We chose the last one and the logo came to life. Everyone was excited with the logo inspired by a dispersive prism where all colors of light merge and hide in the white. This is our allegory of the concept of privacy.

… Have you ever seen how a beam of light goes through the prism and splits into 7 different colors? It’s amazing, it’s magic. Yet do you remember we decided to create technology, not magic, so the logo was converted into more techie style: facets, colors, gradients, rays direction…

In the middle of 2018, Beam started to use the prism logo for the first time. Here’s how it looked:

This logo defined the brand colors which are in use till today (well, with slight variations).

III — Good old times 📻

When the desktop wallet launch was approaching, we started to work on a slicker version of our logo. Alexandra, our Design Lead, suggested numerous versions of the logo. There were many discussions and brainstormings about how the Beam logo could look. The discussion’s log would comprise material for another article 😅. Here are some of the suggested ideas which were not accepted:

In our new logo, the playful multicolored gradients gave space to more respectable and trustworthy touches. The logo became more minimalistic and better recognizable. The color scheme shifted from pink/violet to green/blue. Do you want to know why?

First of all, green is the most readily perceived color. Second, green is all about harmony, balance, and peace. We want our users to stay calm and trust our product. Third, blue is a color of confidence, control, logic, honesty, and freedom. Neon cold colors are associated with reliability and stability. As Beam is! Finally, we’ve topped it off with pink/violet, a little bit of creativity, extravagance, and fantasy. Let me introduce the updated logo:

The dark background wasn’t chosen by chance. It is strongly associated with privacy. We knew that using a dark background would pose some limitations, however, we’ve optimistically “let the worries go”. Later we faced a problem — the logo downloaded from our web-site was most often pasted on light backgrounds.

Here are some not-so-pretty examples of using our logo on various backgrounds:

Side note: we created a media kit that can be easily downloaded from the Beam website. The logo pack there includes guidelines with different scenarios of Beam logo in various contexts. For example, it includes a logo with a transparent background which we strictly recommend to use only on dark background. To download the media kit click the right mouse button on the logo or choose Media Kit from the Resources menu.

IV — Welcome to the new decade 🎆

After a dozen releases for Desktop, Android and iOS wallets it was the time to improve the current logo. The logo should become even better balanced (or should I even say “pixel perfect”). There are only a few tiny changes that I made in this most recent iteration:

The rays

Gradient has the same angle on each ray: it makes them fade evenly
The white ray became wider so that both sides of the prism look more balanced

The colors

Just became brighter

The font

The letter geometry was modified
The font became bolder

Here are all the logo versions for final comparison:

This is how it looks on our printed products:

So, for the time of writing, this is the most recent version of the Beam logo. We do not promise that it won’t change in the future. But we can promise you, we will continue to improve!