How we crafted our branding

by Lloyd & Polar • 11/01/2023 • 3 min read

Introduction

Today, I'm delighted to delve deep into the intricacies of our design process that brought to life the website and branding you currently see for Hivemind. Our commitment lies in the art of crafting a unique brand that seamlessly integrates into the FIRST community, requiring us to distinguish ourselves from the rest of the crowd.

Our core values extend to the development of user-friendly applications, designed to keep people coming back for more. This not only enriches the creative minds of both novice and seasoned developers and designers but also fosters a holistic understanding of design philosophies. We will elaborate on this in this blog post.

Starting Out

From the outset, our vision for the branding was one of sleekness and cleanliness. We drew inspiration from a wealth of sources, with many ideas stemming from websites like the following

• Evervault
• Vercel
• Linear

So whilst creating this initial design, we wanted to mimic all the things we liked from these sites. What we came up with was very simple, but incapsulates a lot of what you'll continue to see in this article.

This was our first initial design for our logo, and whilst it's not nearly as complex as our current one is, this was sort of a prototype or proof of concept of what we thought we'd want to encapsulate with our final design.

Later, we began concepting design ideas for what we wanted our finalized logo to look like. This is kind of a similar design process to cadding a robot. You come up with a lot of different concepts for things before you have the final working design.

We first began by creating a sort of word graph to get down a ton of different ideas and styles, which closely relate to eachother, and then built out designs from those. Here is where i'll hand it off to Lloyd, who handled all the illustrations for the logo side of things.

The design process

I began by sketching out the first few ideas I had based on the wishes of Hivemind as well as my own personal associations with the brand and the name. This helped me establish a good baseline of the themes I wanted to present with the logo and the logotype. After working and thinking on a few of the ideas, the logo we decided to use ended up being a sort of amalgamation of a few different perspectives on the name Hivemind and the space the brand is working in.

The finished logo is a hexagonal shape resembling a bee's head. The icon is also purposefully constructed in a way that each of its parts resemble an isometric view of a cube, to invite the interpretation of it being a sort of room with two doors. The logotype makes use of themes in the space of robotics and tech. During the process of creating the logo. We agreed upon a few colors that fit the idea of what Hivemind was trying to convey, so we ended up blending them into a gradient that serves as the main colorway of the logo.

Resources

You can view our branding guidelines here.