tw-rl

At the end of a branding project, usually all we see is the final shiny new logo. But more interesting is actually everything that went into arriving at that final mark. Here’s a peak under the hood for one of our recent branding projects at Primary. 🧵

This project is for Stellar, a website to discover and hire top-end creatives I'm building with @aarolston. Keep in mind the logo’s primary use is the web, so it needs to scale and read well there.

The name Stellar is a reference to the creatives on the platform “being the best,” like stars in a vast universe. So to start, we settled that the mark would have a loose celestial theme. So we kicked off melding an eye with stars.

Kind of cool, but these felt like we had seen them before. Perhaps what would be more interesting is to illustrate our creatives as individual stars that are part of a larger cohesive group? We experimented with dots to see if that made sense.

Not bad, but too finicky, especially when scaled down. What else “solar system” would be interesting? What about orbital patterns or shooting stars?

The “moon meets shooting star” here really stood out immediately. It was highly graphic—in that it was only two forms—and the gradient moving in opposite directions was a dead simple representation of a shooting star. Totally unique. Ah ha! We dig it. Let's apply some typefaces.

A serif felt elegant here, but too dated. The vibe here is more futuristic. We decided PP Neue Montreal felt right—modern, clean, stoic, functional, and versatile for our needs across materials.

For a week we were psyched. It felt right. But as we started applying it to the website and other assets, it not only lacked the energy we hoped for, it was also unusable on transparent backgrounds. Reluctantly, we decided to back off of it.

But! We did love that upwards movement, and the idea of a shooting star. So we kept the concept and hit Figma again with this in mind.

Literal stars felt cliche, but squares felt interesting. As we played with the scale of the squares, we realized we could create a shooting star. Not only that, but the mark checked the boxes for movement, energy, community, and growth that we had been looking for.

This was it.

It worked with images for creatives too, expressing our original idea of growth and talent.

It also had an infinite number of patterns that felt fresh and fun.

And voila, we had our mark, just in time to stay on track to launch Stellar this summer. I'm psyched to share it with you all. DM me if you’re interested.