Designing the new logo of Kima Ventures
Despite its apparent simplicity, this new logo for Kima Ventures is the result of a deep thinking process, and a strong will to be different. I will not spend a ton of time detailing the creative flow; however here are the successive steps that produced this new identity.
The whole thing started with a tweet by Jean de La Rochebrochard:
When I stumbled into the tweet, I was already quite skeptical about Kima’s logo. It didn’t stand out from the other VCs logos, while their growing reputation was asking for it. Right away, I decided to get in touch with Jean to offer my help.
I quickly realised that Jean’s vision for Kima was very well defined. He had the right keywords and sentences to illustrate it: Fast, No Bullshit, Scaling VC with care, Changing & Stepping up the VC game.
The “no bullshit” and “with care” statements meant being transparent and approachable — making Kima clearly different from most VC’s identities, usually very neutral and/or secretive.
Initially, brainstorming on a figurative logo didn’t work out ⛔️
Some companies have a figurative logo. Apple and Shell reproduce visually their very same name. With the help of Jean, I tried to understand the basic meaning of the word Kima. Two explanations came out:
- In greek, kýma (κύμα) means “wave”
- Kima also refers to a spider species (you don’t want to see…), which inspired Jérémie Berrebi (ex Kima’s director) to find the name.
It was difficult for me to reconcile those two meanings: the wave and the spider. I tried to think of alternatives to represent a venture capital firm, but I couldn’t come up with anything relevant enough. As a result, I made the decision to keep going with a typographic identity.
The typographic approach ✍️
When you only have two words to feature in a logo, there aren’t that many options to display them, unless you decide to break the basic writing convention and go a little crazy (which seemed too alternative for an investment firm).
Which leaves us three options:
Here we are with some typographic logos. Well, that was not too hard, right! Now which one to choose?
A square strategy in mind ⏹
Kima Ventures is mostly an online-only brand. It is active on Twitter, Facebook and Medium. You can see their logo sometimes on the websites of the startups they back, or on web articles.
There’s one thing that social media have in common: profile pictures are squared — or 1:1 ratio. Furthermore, if you look at how websites showcase partners logo, it’s likely to be also a square layout rule. Which makes square the main container for a brand such as Kima Ventures.
So I putted the different writings in a same sized square:
Clearly, versions B and C stand out much more. They’re way easier to read when they’re small.
So which one to choose between B and C? Since Kima can’t be fully understood without Ventures, it wouldn’t make sense to have one word bigger than the other. Version B it is!
Finding the right font 🖋
Picking a font for your logo is (almost) like picking a name for your child. I said almost :) It will be its lifelong identity. It’s so important that it should really carry your message. As we said, we want to reflect care and approachability. A bad font would then be sharp and complex with a high contrast, whereas a good font would be slightly rounded and have a continuous thickness on the letters.
Long story short, we fell in love with Plau font.
Plau perfectly fits Kima’s DNA : quite playful, and original enough.
I tried “Kima Ventures” with different weights, with/without capital letters :
Lowercase worked much better, so I decided to go for it fully. I wanted the words to appear as bold as possible, keeping in mind that “e” and “a” letters should not be too greasy.
Framing the typeface 🔲
Having a font, as beautiful as it may be, doesn’t stand out easily. So I started to dig around, and thought of framing the typeface in two bricks like Legos.
Jean told me he loves Lego. Everything it represents : building with bricks, the shapes of the characters, and the story telling of the lego adventures. It can actually refers to the startup world. Startups wants to scale, to duplicate a business quickly, to live an adventure, just like a kid playing with a bunch of legos.
I tried a first shape that I simplified, and the minor change quite satisfied me.
But it still lacked some aspects of the brief that I had in mind from the beginning, so I brought back two notions : scaling and duplicating.
With those two shapes, I changed some lines to the frame and ended up with something both showing bricks and referring to scaling.
Picking a color 🎨
To put the final touch to the logo, I wanted to associate it to a very bright color, that would make it stand out (among a pool of dull logos). I looked around, and I found that turquoise was used by many startups in various sectors, and brought a very bright effect:
After playing a bit around it, I decided on a raw and flashy turquoise:
Adding a miniature 🐣
In addition to the square strategy I had in mind to design Kima Ventures logo, one more thing should be taken into account. On social media, the profile picture always comes with the name next to it. As a result, having a typographic logo in those situations only makes it awkward and useless. Consequently, I completed the logo identity with a miniature, keeping the frame shape and using the “K” of Kima.
There it was! A versatile identity that stands out, and that embodies the vision of Kima Ventures.
Thanks a lot for reading, it was pleasure for me to share the creation process behind this work. Thank you Jean for trusting me on this mission.
