Making New: The Agilion Identity
We’ve had a blast working with Agilion on a number of their client projects — from helping startups with product strategy, pitch decks, product prototypes and marketing websites, all the way to designing the core components of business systems for larger organizations. After wrapping up our most recent client project, we were asked to focus our efforts on the Agilion identity. Heck yeah.
Let’s go.
Agilion’s roots are in code. They’ve built many fantastic web applications for startups and now focus primarily on making the complex more simple by building business systems for organizations who want to be more efficient.
So where do we start? Over the years, Agilion has had a number of logos, changing to represent their evolving offerings and strategy. So we set out to create an identity system that stayed true to their technical roots, but was also flexible enough to use for many years.
Knowing the folks at Agilion and working with them in various capacities, we had a bit of a head-start on understanding their vision and defining the project goals. That being said, it was still important to explore what they stood for as a brand and where they are headed, so we did a few exercises using the Brand Deck to get ideas churning.
What should this thing look like?
Once we felt good about how things should feel, we created a scratchboard (mess) in Illustrator, where we could try out ideas and fiddle with new marks. There’s nothing quite like getting stuck, closing everything down, and reopening the next day to find new inspiration. Oh, and we used paper too. Paper is important.
You are not drawing the thing. You are drawing things to clear space for the actual thing to appear.
— Geoff McFetridge
In some notes for his drawing class at Cooper Hewitt, Geoff McFetridge said “You are not drawing the thing. You are drawing things to clear space for the actual thing to appear.” Sometimes it’s really easy to get the idea mess out of the way. And sometimes it takes a few more car drives, or a few more trips to the library (or internet).
After passing a lot of paper planes back and forth, we linked up our favorite ideas and began to wrap context around them. We refined a palette of bright, screen-y colors and chose Pressura Mono for the logotype — a nod to the monospaced coding environment (with some nice refinements for easy reading).
Stuff we tried
Let’s just lose the ‘A’, okay? Agilion logos from the past, and some of our initial concepts focused on the letter “A”, for obvious reasons. Monograms are neat and they work well in many cases, but maybe we could do better?
We wanted this new identity to support the Agilion core values, primarily ‘simplicity’ and ‘effective communication’, as well as the iterative nature of product development.
Ground Control to Major Tom
We found a signal. The signal concept was simple. The digital wavelength represented communication to us, and it hinted at movement. High-five!
The other neat part? It was also a nod to Agilion’s technical focus and what they are great at serving up. And it isn’t an ‘A’, per se, but there are traces of the letterform there too for those who are looking. And maybe best of all, it was nostalgic. Our friends at Agilion mentioned that the signal reminded them of Atari space invaders. It was familiar, and new. ✨
Thanks to Adam and the Agilion crew for bringing us in on this project. We hope the Signal represents you well! — M.N.Co
(And thanks to Alli Berry for co-designing/writing 🙌)
Make New Company is a digital design studio in Burlington, Vermont.
