Re-Brand New

For the first time ever, SimpleBits has a logo! Roughly six years ago, I took a stab at creating an isometric set of three boxes (cardboard, to be specific). It was really an icon — and one that sat in the header alongside my personal site at the time, the now-defunct cederholm.org. Over the years, it’s always been there, and I’ve probably overdone it in terms of branding: I put the boxes everywhere. It became the brand. But it was always awkward, and highly inflexible. It worked terrible in print, where at small sizes, the pixelated blocks looked more like botched clip art.

Several months ago, I finally started on a new logo design — something I’d been meaning to do for years. It went rather quickly, playing with four curly brackets set in Avenir that created a frame around a hand-drawn cube (vector this time!). I finally had something I didn’t hate the next day. I’m excited to have a mark that’ll be flexible going forward, and it was crucial for me to create one that could be any size, or color (even looking intact using a single color).

(fig).
I owe Greg Storey (Airbag Industries) thanks for suggesting Whitney for the logo’s type, after I realized that the previously-utilized Triplex just wasn’t working.

It was the logo refresh that forced me to rework the site design as well. I’m not one to change things for the sake of changing things, but the new logo was a good excuse to update the templates as well. And what you see now is the result of several weeks of tinkering.

Much of the structure and layout of the site remain the same. Nothing earth-shattering here. This time around, I’m trying out an elastic (Elastic Design) em-based layout. If you’re unfamiliar, try resizing the text in your browser to see what happens. For this particular site, I think it works well. If I had the need/desire/requirement for an additional column, then I would’ve explored other fluid or variable fixed-width (clagnut: Variable fixed width layout) options. But for this simple, two-column set-up, I thought it’d be interesting to try something with ems.

I’m hoping the revised logo will help swing the rest of the company forward. I have a lot of ideas and things in mind for the future, and this is merely step #1. Here goes nothing. But first, new business cards need ordering.