Shrimpy: Logo Redesign

Published in

The Startup

5 min readApr 22, 2019

Shrimpy is a fast-paced dynamic startup in the heart of Silicon Valley. It focuses on cryptocurrency portfolio management and a real-time trading API. It has been almost a year since I joined Shrimpy as a UI/ UX and Visual Designer. We are a small team with a great passion for working relentlessly to disrupt the landscape of cryptocurrency portfolio management by providing our users with the best possible experience and value from the Shrimpy platform. In order to achieve this mission, each team member has been wearing multiple hats at the same time!

Our previous Shrimpy logo seemed to be more aligned with an old-school restaurant business rather than a cutting-edge technology company. We wanted to redesign the logo since the first day I joined, and finally, the time came after long procrastination due to other business priorities. Let’s have a look at the process we went through and decisions we made to create the final logo.

Design Brief

I started with creating a design brief and handing it to Michael (CEO of Shrimpy) to fill it out. He answered all the questions I had. In the brief, I asked questions like — what do you like and dislike about the current brand identity, the story behind the existing brand, adjectives to associate with the brand, etc. We discussed all the answers to get a clear view of his vision and expectations. This step gave me a solid starting point for design research.

Research

After the design brief, I did in-depth research on contemporary design trends, both from theoretical and application perspectives. In order to get some real-life examples, I also looked into what other businesses are doing for their branding and design identity. In this step, I realized how unique and inconspicuous the Shrimpy logo was. With an open mind to different possibilities, I continued brainstorming and my research.

Mood Board

With the collected information from the design brief and my research, I created a mood board with images, texts, shapes, and sample objects that elicited the essence and theme we wanted to convey through our logo and overall branding.

Ideation and Sketches

We wanted our logo to be simple, identifiable, distinguishable, yet elegant and modern at the same time. I started sketching ideas on paper by jotting down every little idea that came to my mind. I spent a significant amount of time on ideating and sketching the logo to narrow down our choices.

Illustration

After some serious effort, once the paper sketch was finalized, I started digitizing those sketches and exploring different design directions. At first, I was thinking of getting rid of the shrimp from the logo and tried a completely different approach from the ground up. We did come up with few potential alternative options; however, all those appeared to be rather generic and dull. None of them stood out like our shrimp! Still, we shortlisted a few options for the new logo that the team liked.

Shortlist

Changing the logo completely is always a radical thing to do. Since our user base is already familiar with the signature Shrimpy “shrimp” logo, replacing that core identity with something entirely different would not only have confused our existing users but also, Shrimpy might have abruptly lost its accrued brand value.

“Identities are the beginning of everything. They are how something is recognized and understood.” — Paula Scher

Also, as I already mentioned our signature “shrimp” symbol is unique and quite unambiguous, we decided to stick to the shrimp but simplified it with a modern elegant touch.

At this point, we knew which direction we wanted to go for our logo redesign. I focused on the details and continuously modified it based on iterative feedback. Over time, it looked more cohesive and welcoming. Our previous logo was just a shrimp with no distinct meaning and it was looking counter-clockwise, implying backward motion in time, even though it was completely unintentional. Our current logo is essentially a clockwise shrimp with layers of gradual progression of distinct shades of red. It provokes a subliminal sense of security, trust, and progress within a simple yet modern and elegant design paradigm. Also, the dark red color symbolizes that Shrimpy is energetic, powerful, reliable, exciting, determined, assertive, and confident.

For the logo typeface, we explored different types of fonts but agreed that we would incorporate sans serif font because of its simplicity, cleanliness, and recognizability.