Coforma Design Focus: A New Name and Logo
Co-Authored by Coforma staff: Arden Klemmer (Director of Product Design), Angela Palm (Director of Strategic Communications), and Ashleigh Axios (CXO and Partner)
Our Coforma Design Focus blog series provides an inside look at the design phases that led to the new Coforma brand.
When we changed our business name from &Partners to Coforma, we saw an opportunity to direct our focus inward and unearth a brand that reflects our growing company: welcoming, bold, and creative.
A couple weeks in, we’re still finding more ways to savor our new name, Coforma — partly because we had grown accustomed to near-constant roadblocks with the name &Partners. From spelling, spacing, and capitalization to SEO and the problematic ampersand (&) that cannot be used in social media handles or government applications, nothing was “easy” about our original, simple name.
Over the course of a few months, we snuck in extra hours towards this investigation. We developed a new logo, voice, and visual brand identity that we’re proud to share with our partners, audiences, and the public. This piece provides a walkthrough of how we selected a new name, logo, and visual brand identity that fit our team and could scale as we grow over the years to come.
New Name, Same Great Team
We wanted the new name to reflect who we are and how we show up — welcoming, bold, progressive, nimble, and dedicated to crafting lasting solutions that improve the communities served by our government, commercial, and nonprofit partners. We also wanted the new name to reflect the partnerships themselves, retaining the core value of collaboration the name &Partners showcased.
To uncover the perfect new name, we first aligned around the company brand prism, mapped the business model, and determined our company archetype. That alignment guided an exploration of words that represented core attributes of our workplace and elements of the company personality.
Research into root words and unique expression of these qualities allowed us to try initial concepts in various combinations, wordplay, and hybrids.
In parallel with our root word research, we considered a few key types of brand names.
- Descriptive: Explains the service offered by the company (e.g., Paypal, Salesforce, Facebook). We were open to a descriptive name, but they tend to work better for products.
- Invented: Fresh and articulate, offers a creative name and attitude for a brand (e.g., Xerox, Google, Yahoo, Napster). This name type easily transforms a company’s tone, but they can be tricky to navigate for smaller businesses.
- Experimental: Leverages new, distinctive connections from a lexicon of terms (e.g., Apple, Caterpillar, Blackberry). This was an appealing name type that could be aligned with our company’s culture.
- Acronyms: Abbreviations of longer company names that are hard to remember (e.g., KFC, IBM, NASA). We ruled this type out early on because letter sets don’t convey much meaning, and we weren’t looking to shorten our company’s name.
Additional parameters for a new name included:
- Two words or less
- Three syllables or less
- Uniqueness, particularly in our space
- Industry agnostic, can work with our government, commercial, and nonprofit clients
- Can adapt as we grow
- No &$#!@ symbols
- No numbers
- Balance between tech and human
- Works with our different company functions
Once we’d narrowed our list to a handful of favorites that fit all of our criteria and landed in one of the three brand name categories we were considering, we did some initial research into the availability of domains and associated social handles.
Coforma fit our team perfectly, and was widely available online. The word coforma comes from two Latin roots, co (meaning together) + forma (meaning to shape or form).
Framing up the Coforma Logo
With the name decided, we undertook the process of developing a logo fitting to us and our new name. We identified restrictions and defined the work our logo needed to do. The name Coforma captures our sincerity, professionalism, and dedication to collaboration. We wanted the logo to follow suit and further emphasize that we are bold and versatile. We also knew that our logo would eventually parent a suite of logos for programs like Health+. Our goal was to develop a logo that could easily scale in the future.
We had a lot of ideas and a few restrictions to keep us on track. For instance, the root words “co” and “form” gave us a metaphor to work with: we wanted the underlying meaning (collaboration + shaping) to be reflected in the logo itself. Overlapping two or more letter shapes, for example, formed something new. The letter C is a beautifully simple shape that can be pulled apart and infinitely morphed — a building block in itself. It could become smoother and more elegant, connecting to or cradling other parts of the logo, creating a sense of togetherness and highlighting a relaxed environment. Or, it could be broken into smaller pieces, and the fragments could be used to build other images and forms that allowed us to tell a quick, yet meaningful story.
We explored many options for crafting a C that would demonstrate collaboration, partnership, and individual pieces coming together to form something stronger and more unique than any individual piece could be on its own. This felt like an apt way to depict the idea that Coforma’s strength is in its people and its partnerships. Some explorations of this concept depicted the C from the name. Some leaned into the C and O coming together. And there were many others.
In another set of explorations, we explored the C with a line over it, which is used commonly in medical abbreviations, meaning with. As another way to visualize the Co portion of the name, graphically, we pushed this concept a few different directions.
Among a few other directions, we honed in on a tidy building block: a simplification of the C, more of a <, which could be used to create an F (see the drawing all the way on the right).
Ultimately, we ended up favoring a solution that turned the first O in Coforma into a frame, with two simple shapes coming together to form the O shape, but also becoming — as we began to imagine — building blocks for an extensible brand system. Like the crop tool in Photoshop, or when you hold your hands up to frame a composition, the shape holds meaning for us.
The frame was a very good find — a wellspring of possibility. You don’t want to know how many shapes we made with that little corner. By hand, with paper cut outs, in Figma, in Illustrator. I’ve never been more grateful for a dot grid journal. Once you start, it’s uncanny what you can build within this limitation.
During this process, we discovered just how communicative and dynamic our “frame element” is. We can do fun things like this:
But the frame means more to us than a fun design element. We seek to reframe narratives through our work. We orient each project’s lens to focus on humans. By bringing real people and their stories into strategy, design, and development, we benefit from a greater perspective and create better products. And now we have a logo to fit:
And we have a lot of room to expand the brand across programs like Health+, which constructs a more supportive infrastructure around the most medically vulnerable populations in the US through private-public collaboration, cross-industry dialogue and collaboration, and creative problem solving with the potential for policy, code, and systems solutions. The Health+ logo extends the Coforma brand visually, and reconfigures the frame elements into a plus sign, as below.
We can build out icons for other programs down the road, too:
Soon, we’ll share a little bit about the fonts, typeface, and grid lines we selected for Coforma. Follow us to stay tuned!
