Letters and Symbols: How I designed the Keen IO logo
My name is Micah Wolfe and I’m the Design Director at Keen IO. Months before joining the team fulltime, I designed the first version of our logo. It was one of those rush-jobs that had to be finished in a matter of days.
Months later, we began to notice some problems. Everyone seemed to have a different way of pronouncing our company name: Keen, Key-knee-oh, Keen-dot-eye-oh, and worst of all, Keen Ten (shudder).
Looking at our original logo, we can see why it could be interpreted in these ways.
Several things make it difficult to figure out if this is one word or two: all the letters being the same height, the lack of space between keen and io, and the trend of incorporating the domain suffix into part of the name (e.g. awe.sm). Then there was the typeface, DIN 1451, the font used for German roadsigns. The combination of an I with no serifs and a font with flat verticals, the O looked more like a zero. We needed a new typeface.
At the time of designing the first logo, I had a very different idea of what Keen was offering to the world (which I won’t get into here). The icon symbolized that, and as the product was solidified (analytics via API), it failed. We needed a new icon.
The Process
After much discussion, considering other names, and even evaluating the legal aspects with one in particular (I’ll get to that later), we decided to be Keen-eye-oh. We’d solidified how to say our name, but not yet how to write it.
NOTE: The typeface and icon choices and designs were done simultaneously, but I will talk about them separately for the sake of clarity and your sanity.
The Typeface
We needed something with a nice circular O and a well proportioned K. I swear, K’s are commonly very awkward. Like violas in an orchestra, nobody notices them unless they have a solo.
</orchestra joke>
We also needed something that represented us. Not just what we do, but who we are. After working together for 6 months, we were getting a pretty good idea of this. I listed some words that described us:
- approachable
- friendly
- technical
- logical
- positive
- clear
- straightforward
- no-nonsense
After searching far and wide and trying hundreds of typefaces, I narrowed it down to a few friendly, rounded fonts. This included Museo Sans Rounded, but the K just wasn’t right. The winner was Gotham Rounded Book. Hoefler & Frere-Jones, the type foundry who designed it, describes it like so:
“Serious. Sometimes. Gotham Rounded is a technical letter that goes from friendly to high-tech to cheeky with ease. [It] is the lettering of engineering: the marks on precision instruments, blueprints, stencils and templates.”
Sounds like us, doesn’t it?
The Icon
A simple chart or graph symbol would’ve been the easy way out. And seriously, how boring would that be? We may be nerdy, but we do not wear pocket protectors. I know, nobody else does either, but still. Not only would something like that misrepresent us culturally, but it would have been limiting. What if we offered something more in 5 years? Would we still want a pie chart to be our brand? Probably not.
This had to be more. This had to be something elemental. Something abstract. This is where it started to get really hard. I had to pair this symbol with an adjective. Yipes.
I looked closely at the definition of “keen”
keen |kēn|
adjective
2 sharp or penetrating, in particular:
- (of a sense) highly developed: I have keen eyesight.
- (of mental faculties) quick to understand or function: her keen intellect.
- (of the air or wind) extremely cold; biting.
- (of the edge or point of a blade) sharp.
- literary (of a smell, light, or sound) penetrating; clear.
As I mentioned earlier, we had previously discussed another name for our company: Prism. Sadly, the lawyers found some risks with it so we abandoned the idea, but for some reason I couldn’t let go of the concept, and I soon realized why. The symbol of a prism was still perfect for us, even if it wasn’t our name. Prisms are scientific and sophisticated yet simple and elegant. They segment light, much like we do with data. And because of their triangular shape, they evoke a sense of stability. I held a mental image of a prism and again, read the definition of Keen. It was abstract and it was working.
I explored countless representations of a prism, from simple triangles to variations of penrose tribars. I explored other concepts as well, some of them based on astronomy and “the all seeing eye”. It was time to run ideas by the team.
First Iterations
I printed the designs, each on their own sheet of paper and laid them around our conference (dining room) table. I tend to show designs in grayscale first, to avoid color dictating feedback. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that many people will form an opinion based on color alone, and it blinds their judgment of the form. The response to grayscale usually lacks enthusiasm, but gains clarity.
The competition was really between B C and D. A and E were definitely oddballs that I knew would be eliminated. One was too evil, the other too childish. They were still fun, but having some obvious targets to shoot down can really help with alignment. It feels good to all agree on something, even if it’s in criticism.
“That movie sucked!”
“Lol. Sure did, man. Glad we saw it in IMAX 3D.”
The most popular was B. I liked C, but it was for the wrong audience. Its thin, elegant lines seemed more related to luxury fashion than data science. I took B back to the drawing board to explore colors and other refinements, like moving away from the penrose tribars, which tiptoed a little too close to the Google Drive logo.
Back to the Drawing Board
I didn’t want to modify it just to be different, I wanted to make it better. Looking at it closer, the shape of the white space was starting to bother me. It was a bit wonky because of the “hole” illusion in the center.
I drew it again from scratch, eliminating the center “hole” which helped with eliminating the loop effect. However, this made it awkward because it was trapped in a sort of uncanny valley between a clear 2D design and an optical illusion. I took it a little further by getting rid of the lopped corners, eliminating the optical illusion entirely, and better representing the original prism concept.
Colors and the American Apparel Store
I wanted our brand to be as precise as possible, and since we wouldn’t be dying our own shirts, I created our palette from an existing, established, and broad selection of t-shirt colors at American Apparel. I then color matched them to Pantone swatches (don’t trust the guide on their site because I’ve found that they are frequently wrong) and then tested those colors on-screen.
With the final iteration of the icon and the symbolism of the prism, the colors emerged on their own, solidifying the prism concept even further: RGB, or red, green, blue. Our palette had some hue shifting, so according to the American Apparel color names, our colors would be Pomegranate, Mint, and Teal.
Reworking the Letters
We had decided how to say our name, but we hadn’t decided how to write it. In the designs I presented to the team, I had written our name KEEN I/O.
It looked pretty cool, but I realized that the slash added more complexity, and therefore more potential for confusion. Without the slash, the uppercase letters had some of the shortcomings of the first logo. This led me to use straightforward capitalization. Not only was it clear to read, but the lowercase e-e-n softened it a bit. It was more friendly, like us!
It was a long process, but an important one. I’m really happy with how it came together, and I hope you like it too:
