Designing data.world
In December of last year, longtime friend Brett Hurt asked me if I wanted to go on an adventure. Brett is someone I’ve looked up to for a long time, both personally and professionally. It turns out that after two successful companies, Brett was starting his third and I couldn’t be more excited that he was including me.
If you know Brett, or have worked for any of his past companies, you know that to get hired you need to take a test. Even though I knew Brett for a long time, I was no exception.
My test was to explore what a brand identity might look like for data.world. Specifically, I was to work up some ideas for a logo and report back in one week.
This was a tough task. The name data.world brought to mind a lot of cliché imagery of bits and bytes, of globes and lines. In order to move past those ideas, I decided to embrace them rather than ignore them.This would help clear up brainwaves for more innovative ideas.
I first decided to work with a Serif font. The team thought it conveyed a more serious and academic tone. The first versions, per usual, were not my favorite. But like most things in life, you fail a lot before you succeed.
I also wanted to explore what a Sans Serif design might look like.
Throughout the process I was sharing screenshots with Brett so he could share with the team. This early back-and-forth was critical to making such quick progress. The team agreed that they liked the Serif font choice better, and specifically one treatment of it.
From here I wanted to work on a few things about the wordmark that were bothering me. I didn’t like the way the Serif on the ‘d’ was slanted down and to the left. I felt like it drew the eye away from the logo. Additionally, I thought the difference between the tall and short letters was too large. I began working with the fonts, the kerning, the letter widths and heights. The changes were subtle but I thought they created a much more balanced mark.
With the wordmark complete, it was time to explore an icon to complete the logo. It was about this time that an interesting conversation emerged in Slack.
I took this idea and ran with it, and quickly came up with a simple owl illustration and shared it with the team.
The guys loved it, which led to even more explorations.
The good news is, I got the job, which let me continue to explore Sparkle. Future iterations of Sparkle would see him get a bit more stylized, and we eventually ended up where we are today.
People seemed to like Sparkle, and it wasn’t long before I was making ‘Sparkle-tars’ for everyone that joined our team. Here are just a few:
The true tipping point for fully adopting Sparkle as part of our brand was when our kids started getting into the fun.
With both Sparkle and the wordmark decided on (and the approval of our kids) we had our logo.
What we are doing at data.world is pretty ambitious. Our goal is to create the most meaningful, collaborative and abundant data resource on the planet. We think our logo does a good job of combining the seriousness of that mission but also the amazing personalities of our team, and fun we have working together.
Monday July 11th was our official launch and we are currently in preview release. If you are interested in learning more, head over to data.world.
