Fresh look for Yopeso. The story behind our new logo
Have you ever felt that it’s time to make a change in your appearance, to reflect how you’ve changed on the inside?
Well, that happens to brands too! But, because of some reasons easy to imagine, brands are less spontaneous.
Instead of going straight to the half shaved fiery redhead that we wanted since we were teenagers we put a lot of research, passion and wise, balanced decisions into our redesigning process.
We’ve got exciting news to share with you — Yopeso has a new look!
As people and companies evolve, so do brands. When somebody mentions a brand name, the first thing that comes to our minds is the brand’s logo.
But if a logo no longer represents the values and personality of the company, then it’s time to make a change.
The rebranding process occurs when a company decides to change an important component of the brand, such as the logo, name or core values. This is a marketing strategy designed to align the visual identity of the brand with both internal and external changes.
Types of rebranding
There are two types of rebranding:
- proactive rebranding — initiated by the company that desires for instance to strengthen the connection with its consumers
- reactive rebranding — when the brand goes through acquisitions, legal issues, bad advertising etc.
We believe in empowering positive changes. The rebranding of Yopeso belongs to the first category, aiming to improve its appearance and reflect the positive evolution of the company.
People often believe that brands are created exclusively by designers. The truth is that, behind a successful brand, there is a whole team that shares the responsibilities. A small part of our rebranding process is changing our logo design.
Next, I will guide you through the process, but first, let’s see how the old logo looked.
A brief history of our logo
The old logo served us well for a long time, but it was no strategy put into shaping the previous brand. For a long time, the main focus has been on the actions that we took and the quality of our services, but now we believe it’s time to pay attention to our look too. The most important problems with our old logo are:
- it seems overcomplicated
- the characters used are far too thin, giving a fragile general look
- the logo elements look misaligned
- the two lines of text have different widths
- uneven alignment to the right of the name “YOPESO” and the slogan “YOUR PERSONAL SOFTWARE”
- many overlaps of the blue shades so often used by companies in the software service industry
- there were a mixture of sharp and rounded forms that weren’t consistent
- is has an outdated look and it needs a refresh for a more professional look
What we wanted to achieve is:
- a memorable symbol that looks good on the marketing products.
You might be wondering why a logo should stay minimal and simple?
Because it gives design the advantage of versatility. Adopting a minimalist look enables our logo to be used across a wide range of media, such as on business cards, billboards, pin badges or something as small as a website favicon;
- a recognizable logo would have to be a shape that allows quick identification: the simpler, the better.
A great logo should be really easy to reproduce from your memory.
The brand and the character behind is changing — we have recently revised our core values — and we would like our logo to reflect this change and reveal our identity, as it is our visual centerpiece.
Let’s see together what keeps our wheel spinning!
Vision Statement
We believe the SIMPLEST solutions root from efficient collaborations among passionate professionals. Built on trust and integrity, we foster an open-culture that inspires everyone to grow, find meaning, add value, and give back to the community.
Yopeso Core Values
People
We inspire people to grow professionally in an open culture environment to help us to deliver top quality products. We care about the concerns of our clients to keep their belief in our products strong.
Transparency
We create powerful connections in our community and with our clients. We believe that transparency in the business is of utmost importance to garner the confidence of clients and the key for meaningful partnerships. We deal with our clients and nurture based on transparency, trust, open culture and consistency.
Professionalism
We enthusiastically give our best-of-class products and services and strive for optimal efficiency and professionalism in all that we do. We serve our community by developing people to deliver quality services.
When I first came here, I realized that some changes in our visual identity are about to come.
Over the last few months, our design team had the pleasure to bring a refresh in the visual identity of the company Yopeso. Changing the visuals of Yopeso was a big challenge for us, but we managed it very well and learned by doing. This is why we want to share with you the most important aspects of the process.
Designing our mark
In order to get the best results, the process of creating the new logo needs to be rigorous, with well-defined steps.
As everyone else, we had an example to look up to. Our inspiration was Ramotion, a professional branding company located in San Francisco. The entire process was a matter of evolution, each choice leading to the next one, always keeping in mind the starting point: our vision and values.
1. Creating a Mood-board
With the help of the keywords extracted from our core values, we created a mood-board (a collection of images) in the InVision application. More precisely, we researched for images representing each keyword and gathered them together.
The keywords chosen are the following:
- software development
- consulting
- multiplatform
- global
- passion
- trust
- growth
- ownership
- open-culture
- belongingness
- enjoyment
2. Extracting shapes from images
Next, we tried to simplify and reduce the images to shapes. We had at least 5 symbols corresponding to each keyword from which we chose the best one through voting sessions in our department meetings.
3. Combining the symbols
Once the symbols have been chosen, the next step involves combining them in order to explore a range of strategic concepts on which to base the logo. The execution doesn’t matter at this stage, but the resulting number of concepts, some of them going to be chosen for digital iterations.
4. Refining the voted symbols and exploring character types
Create, create, create!
This is the only way you’ll get a unique logo. We can not choose the path of our logo if our choices are limited.
Here, we had multiple cycles of refining and voting, until we found a few versions that would fit best with Yopeso’s values and personality.
What does the new logo mean?
Boldness, courage, balance, and dynamism.
The paradigm behind it is the following: the logo is created by combining an arrow (expressing the expansionist trends of the brand), the initial letter “Y” and the symbols very commonly used in programming languages ”>” and “/”.
For the logotype, we’ve explored many typefaces, looking for something that would complement the look of the new logo symbol. Here are a few examples: Avenir, Nunito, Museo Sans, Proxima Nova, Meta Pro, Gill Sans, Gotham, Pelago, Europa Regulas.
Finally, the best choice was Gotham, which we customized by rounding the corners for a better match with the symbol of the logo.
Because everybody considered that Yopeso identifies with the color blue, we chose to keep it, but with a bold twist. Now, our logo stands out grace to the bright blue which reflects our spirit.
…and guess what? Our Founders loved it!
A good logo should pass the test of time. Also, if you need to explain how to use it in 100 pages, you’re doing it wrong. This is what we tried to avoid when we created the new logo, keeping it simple and functional.
Now that our logotype and logo symbol are created, it’s time to harmonize them. To establish a balanced ratio between symbol size and the characters, we have made accurate measurements.
The height of character “o” was marked with x — unit to which we have reported all the distances between the elements of the logo and the padding.
Our brand new pattern
Grace to the simple and minimalist shape of the logo symbol, we have been able to create a pattern composed of its elements.
…and here is our shiny new facebook profile.
Want to know a secret? We’re ambitious! We’ve been growing really fast during the past two years, from 25 to 75 talents only in Romania, and still, have big plans ongoing. We believe that our new identity will take us further.
We are so proud to share our new brand with you. I hope this article gave you more insight into our redesign and maybe our process will help you create your own awesome logo.
Please let us know what you think about our logo and if you have any suggestion for us, don’t be shy!
