So I’ve been experimenting with the idea of an interactive or reactive logo lately. I’ve been trying to ind the sweet spot between my interests in generative art and data visualization.
Roundarch had an intranet years ago called Keystone, which evidently, was very slow, unappreciated and under-utilized. I of course didn’t experience any of this because I’m kind of new here – a lot of us are. We’re growing. And as the company grows so do our internal knowledge/client management needs. Enter the rebirth of Keystone, our confluence-based intranet.
Like most brand refreshes, we needed a clean slate to convey what keystone is all about; a new brand touch-point to ignite excitement. The challenge here was to create something a little out of the ordinary yet something that embodied what keystone is (part intranet, part wiki, part client presentation tool). The difficulty is that keystone is ever-changing, it’s never the same twice. Content is constantly in a state of flux. So are the users. So we set out to reinforce and promote innovation and creative thinking by thinking a little differently about what the logo should be.
It’s difficult to design the shapes and lines of a logo to visually represent something so ethereal as a digital space for sharing/mixing/provoking work/viewpoints/ideas, so we designed the logo to offer the user a glimpse into the inner workings of keystone. The logo mark itself is a visualization of the real-time activity taking place in each of Roundarch’s Communities of Practice. After all, a wiki without activity or an intranet without files doesn’t have a shape and therefore isn’t alive. But by giving form to these parameters floating in the ether, we were able to ground these concepts in something solid – the logo. Each triangle changes size and shape based on certain input parameters being returned to it from the confluence database. It’s not interactive, but reactive.
By choosing a color palette that is vibrant and on-brand, and assigning a color to each of Roundarch’s Communities of Practice, we developed a system whereby, at a glance, a user can see how active each of keystone’s pillars really are – and by extension – can judge keystone’s overall health by looking at the size, shape and placement of each of the triangles. The logo mark doesn’t just tell the story of health, it’s a visual representation of the mixing and converging of diverse opinions and views. By sharing a common boundary, each shape and each color tells their own story while being self-referential and self-reinforcing – like a round arch.
