Designing the Voicy identity
When we started getting serious about Voicy and making it into a product, one of the first steps was to get an idea of what it could look like. Of course, we needed a brand identity to make it more than just an idea living in our minds.
This is the moment where Bram and I start swinging around our hands. Brainstorming (mostly brainfarts) and visualizing in seconds, looking like idiots doing it, but we understand each other – we combine the ideas and I get to work.
The Glyph
“We need a badge!”
Before agreeing on a name, it was clear that we wanted a ‘badge’. Something that grabs your attention between all of the stickers we all stick on our MacBooks. Something that’s recognizable as an icon between your apps. Most of all, something that has sense and connects with the main medium related to the product; the phone.
After a few first sketches I quickly came to an hexagon symbol based on two screens overlapping each other, symbolizing the big TV screen and accompanying iPhone app we had in mind. It felt right straightaway. #twss
One of the requirements we’ve set for making the identity was that it should be able to work in one color. With the digital sketch and its explorations I had at the time, that failed. If I would delete the gradients and the overlapping shapes, I would be left alone with a basic hexagon shape. Meh…
“The logo should work and be just as powerful in one color.”
Converting the shapes to outlines seemed to be the most logical way out to keep the shape we started to love. That’s when it made sense — the lines stand for connections and the traditional phone lines. We immediately noticed the potential for further branding. By blowing up the lines on a huge scale, it created a network of connections. The last touch was made by adding animated ‘comets’, running over the lines, which symbolizes live connections and calls being made.
Comets
#stayconnected
After choosing the blue and purple-ish colors that accompany the glyph and make up the branding, I was eager to play around with the idea of the animated ‘comets’. It was time to remove the dust from After Effects so I could get these lines truly connected.
Since it was just a side project at the time, we weren’t able to work on Voicy full-time, but we did have the animations running on our office televisions all the time — and it made us all crazily excited to make something out of this.
The exploration and usage of the lines and the moving ‘comets’ deserve some more attention on it’s own in a next article, since it became one of the most recognizable brand elements of Voicy. Keep an eye on our Medium to learn more about it soon! 👀
The Final Logo
From ‘Voyc’ to ‘Voicy’
If you would ask some colleagues around the office how this application, showing incoming calls, running on the screen is called, you’d likely receive at least 2–3 different answers. ‘Callscreen’, ‘Screeny’, etc. It was clear that we needed to change this and get this fixed internally first, before plotting any other move.
After a few brainstorms and wildly shouting names around to each other we first came up with ‘Voyc’. Because of the connection with VoIP, a reference to Bynder and Birdy — other start-ups that Label A has founded — with the letter ‘y’ and of course the core of the product; giving a voice to clients.
The only obstacle was pronunciation. ‘Foyk? Voy-zee? Fooi-zie?’ Alright, back to the drawing board… After a little hiatus, it only seemed right to stick to the meant pronunciation and original meaning, in a way that everybody could easily remember. This resulted in the final name: ‘Voicy’. (And we could keep the ‘y’-reference, yaasss! 🎉)
“Giving your client a voice”
With the new name, the ‘i’ in the word mark symbolizes your client that Voicy puts in the middle of your office.
The letters around the ‘i’ are made from basic shapes, symmetrically placed on both sides, that transform into the rest of the letters making up the logo. With some optical kerning touchups afterwards and applying the chosen brand colors, the last touches were made for the final logo.
For the glyph we wanted the logo to be versatile for usage on the big TV screen, but of course also on your smartphone, social media avatars, stickers and who knows, maybe even Apple Watch later on. Therefore we were testing if the icon would still be recognizable when it would scale down in size — it did, but it could use a stronger appearance to improve legibility. By making the lines a bit thicker and playing around with the height to make it appear more rounded when used in a small size, we think we got it right. Here’s the final result!
So, there it is! Ready for all of the adventures that are ahead of us building Voicy into a business and product. As this is only a small part of the total vision behind the branding, more articles will follow soon where we can shed some light on further explorations into functionality and marketing. The comets will probably be the first example of this.
Hope you enjoyed this inside look into creating our branding identity.
If you have any questions, drop a comment below or send a tweet to @CallVoicy on Twitter!
