Part 1: Origin

Written by: Ingrid Ou

The origin behind our name “Koalia” comes from our chosen team animal — the lovable koalas native to Australia. We first decided on the koala as our team’s animal mascot because much like these sedative animals, each of our members are passionate about sleeping in our comfy beds. We then decided that our team name should relate to them in some way. After parsing through koala puns, we found “Koalia”, a combination of the word qualia and koala.

Now that our name was decided, we needed to make a logo to represent our team. Each team member worked on drafting up three different koala-related logos:

After presenting everyone’s logos, we went through all 15 logos one-by-one during a feedback session. By looking through everyone’s logos, we discovered a lot about what we liked and didn’t like about our logos. For example, all of us really enjoyed the idea of drawing leaves in the koala’s mouth and decided to incorporate that for when we present our polished logos. The session was also very insightful for any changes we would have to make. A big issue that came up was how well each logo could be scaled, such as whether resizability would be a problem because the design was too complicated or what details would have to be omitted when downsizing the logo.

Beyond just critiquing each others’ logos, we also brainstormed on how else we could use the designs we came up with. For example, we felt that some of the designs weren’t fit to be logos, but could instead be used as a title or some sort of mascot image instead for the app. With all the feedback we got, we were now ready to each choose one of our logos and polish it up before presenting them one more time.