How I took a break from CEO’ing and worked on a Hack Week project
Every year at Envato we have a couple of Hack Weeks where teams form and work on projects of their own choosing. It’s a fun, creative time where we work on everything from back-end systems to speculative ideas. And every year, I spend the week envious of everyone else who gets to do it. So this year — I put someone else in charge of Envato, and joined in!
Being a CEO is pretty interesting, very challenging and constantly changing job. But at heart, I’m a designer and I often miss making things. So for Hack Week I pitched a simple idea — “Unsplash for Logos” — where the things people can download are not just straight logo templates, but logo kits. Today’s the last day of hack week, and you can now check out the site to browse and download free logo kits!
(Sidenote: you really know your product has made it when people start making “Your Product for X”. All credit to Unsplash, they’ve really created an amazing resource).
Erm, what’s a Logo Kit?
On Envato Elements and Market, we offer tons of individual logo templates, but the customisation on these is pretty limited. More recently I’ve noticed larger kits started appearing that could make many different logos, and this sparked my interest.
So, a logo kit is a simple design system for creating a mix’n’match logo outcome. Most of the time, these are created for badge style logos. But for hack week, we decided to take this idea further with a categorized set of kits for Character and Mascots, Badges and Emblems, Text + Icon logos, and Two Letter Monograms. There are more types of logos (especially just-straight-text ones), but this feels like a good start.
Wait, are these really logos?
Of course, logos work best when they are totally unique, custom designed for the need, and part of a larger branding project. This might be a big agency job (like the ones you see on Brand New), or just a small bespoke job with a freelance brand designer. There are, however, plenty of times when something a little more affordable and quick will do. And for those, logo makers, logo templates, and now logo kits, can do the job.
As a designer-CEO, I get asked regularly about business models like AI-based design, design competitions, and super cheap design. My answer is pretty much always, it’s horses for courses. Technology is enabling lots of new business models, and they generally suit different needs. I’d hate to see a world where all design is from AI or a competition or done on the cheap. But I’m categorically certain that won’t be the future. In practice different models create different types of outcomes, and customers care about what they are getting in different ways.
Putting someone else in charge
So three weeks ago, I asked Ben Chan from the Envato exec team to hold the fort at Envato, while I switched to working on hack week (and did some travelling).
It’s kind of weird having someone else running the company and just seeing stuff, like, happen! And it’s been super fun designing again (even if I was a complete newbie at using InVision, and embarrassingly still designed the site in Photoshop).
Having someone else do your job is always an interesting experience because you realize that you are in fact replaceable. You get to see how someone else does things, and it forces you and your team to systematize things more so you can swap in a new person.
Back when we started Envato, I was the first ‘reviewer’. That is, I used to review every Flash item that people uploaded to sell on our marketplace. Pretty soon, I was a big choke point. My cofounders kept telling me that we should hire someone. I was adamant that nobody else could do it like me. Eventually I relented, we brought someone else in, and sure enough — he was like ten times better at the job.
(Side note: Our first reviewer also used to end every email to me with the email sign-off “Success!” — something I’ve never seen before or since, but really was a fun sign off (much better than “Regards” and “Yours sincerely,” really.)
How Hack Week works at Envato
So our hack week begins with a big Trello Board where people write ideas and pitches. Other people can join asynchronously, or on our Friday pitch day. I pitched the idea of Unsplash for Logos, and for our dev team, the idea of prototyping a builder that uses logo kits.
I must admit I was kind of worried nobody would join the team (I was one of those people who got picked last for teams in school) but luckily a few intrepid Envato’ers signed on either for the full hack week, or just to give some targeted advice (how to set up our analytics right, or to help write a quick bit of legals, and so on).
We’re not supposed to start hacking until, like, hack week actually starts. But our team got a little carried away, and we started a couple weeks early. This was kind of important since we needed to recruit designers to make logo kits. We found lots on our freelance marketplace Envato Studio.
This week, work happened in earnest with copywriting, prototyping, and lots of site work. We hoped to have the site live earlier in the week, but in the end it’ll scrape in today, the last day of hack week!
What we used
For the free site we went with WordPress, set up on Envato Hosted. The WP dev on our team, Aaron, did a stellar job with the site, and WordPress is great for this kind of content project thanks to its enormously flexible structure.
For the logo editor tool that we prototyped — the team used Elm, a language we don’t (yet) use in production normally, but looks really promising. If you’re interested to learn more about Elm, check out Introduction to Elm.
Hope you like it!
So here we are on launch day, excited to see if people like the logo kits. We’re watching downloads and traffic, but most of all I’m interested to see if people get inspired and creative using the logo kits!
As for me, I’ve got another couple of weeks before I have to go back to being CEO. That’s probably a good thing, as I didn’t exactly come up with a great plan for the day after. So I better get back to lining up logo kits for publishing!
Visit Envato Logokit (kit.envato.com)
Success!
