A Quick Brand Update - Mycroft the Company's Branding

Originally published at: http://mycroft.ai/blog/a-quick-brand-update-mycroft-the-companys-branding/

Like any good company knows, brand image is important. Brand image is defined as the impression of a product held by real or potential consumers. This is influenced not only by how the brand presents itself as a professional venture, but also the literal visual elements of the company. Brand colors, logos, typefaces, the whole brand identity. A few months ago we switched out our secondary colors for brighter, more versatile swatches; you can check those out at https://mycroft.ai/colors. Now, it’s time to shake up our primary typeface and subsequently, our company logo.

Type

The type family we’ve used up until now is the Roboto family – a solid sans serif with a variety of weights and styles. And there’s nothing wrong with it aesthetically, but as a company looking to expand into a multitude of languages, we need a typeface that can support that journey. Google’s type family Noto, which is open source and free to download at https://www.google.com/get/noto/, is the best choice for our purposes. It supports a long list of languages, comes in a large variety of style and weights, and is visually similar to Roboto.

Mycroft's company brand is moving to Noto font

Logo

So how does this affect our logo?

Well, not to worry, the changes are overall pretty minor. We used an adapted version of Roboto for our logotype, so it was mostly just a matter of giving Noto the same treatment and making a few adjustments. But what’s the fun in stopping there? For our type-only logo, our logomark is incorporated in place of the O in “MYCROFT”, but neither Roboto nor Noto have a capital O that’s fully round. So, with a little customization, our logotype now has a round O and C to make things consistent across logos.

Mycroft company's new logo compared to old logo

And speaking of consistency, Mycroft had a lot of logos in use.

Too many logos

So we cut it down for consistency purposes. Say goodbye to the confusion over whether our brand logo is supposed to be in uppercase or lowercase!

Mycroft company's new logo setWe’re also working on a new, clear set of brand guidelines that help explain our brand identity and how our brand elements should be used. More to come!

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That looks great. Please give the forum an brushup to, as it still dosnt look good and even worse on mobile phone. And avatars and other graphics are missing…

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To be fair, the forum looking like rubbish is my fault; I pushed an update to Discourse which was a dot zero, and I should have known better. The underlying Postgresql between the old version and new version is preventing a Docker container rebuild, and one of my former colleagues will need to spend a day migrating Postgresql databases (sorry :frowning: ) so that Docker is happy.

Moral of the story: make sure you’re not upgrading to a dot zero.

In my defence, there’s a lot of stuff that breaks backwards compatibility in Discourse 2.0.x, and not all of it is documented very well. Still, should have known better.

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Problem solved… We know Who to blame :slight_smile:
And this time it wassnt the New Guy :slight_smile:

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Don’t worry, I’ll break something big time soon :wink:

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