How do you rebrand a logo designer?

The very first Barnard.co logo

When I first went freelance in 2015, I often worked alongside Wordpress developer Andy White. He would hire me to design websites, which he would then build for his clients. When I sent him over my first invoice… he burst out laughing.

“What the f*** is that?!”, he said.

At first I thought he was referring to my ludicrously low day rate. “Sweet Jesus, that is awful!”, he went on. And it hit me, he was pointing at my logo.

Admittedly, I had knocked it up pretty quickly as a sort of placeholder, until I could devote some real time to it. But yes, it was terrible.

A new dawn

While I was out at lunch, another designer sitting next to us, longtime friend and dev/designer unicorn Andy Styles played around with some logo ideas for me. When I got back, he presented me with what would become my company logo for the next five years.

I loved it! It was simple, it featured the domain name, it used a strong typeface and the square format lent itself perfectly to the space on my portfolio website. It also looked brilliant on a business card.

It hadn’t taken Andy more than half an hour to make, but I went about adding it to every piece of real estate I used under my company name, and there it stayed.

It wasn’t until I updated my portfolio website last month that I noticed a small issue with it. I went to add it as a favicon (the little icon next to the tab at the top of your browser), and the small scale made it completely illegible.

As a fix, I made a sort of iconised version of it that replaced the characters for squares and threw it up on the site.

You specialise in logos, right?

This favicon problem got me thinking. What better time to revamp my logo? I recently made the switch to working only as a logo designer, and as much as I love Andy’s original design, what does it say about me if I can’t claim to have designed my own business logo?

Funnily enough, simplifying Andy’s logo into a 3x3 set of squares might just make a nice looking logo. It’s a simple, bold design. I’d already proven that it scales well and it has meaning to me as it plays homage to the old layout.

So I went about perfecting it.

The Golden Ratio

The Golden Spiral

I recently read an article about how to craft designs that use the Golden Ratio. I’ve known about the Golden Ratio and its use in design layout for some time, but I’ve been seeing more and more logo designs that base their entire structure around its proportions.

For the uninitiated, this ratio (1.61803398874989…), the ‘Divine Proportion’ is found all around us. It’s in nature, in ancient architecture and mathematics (the Fibonacci scale uses it). When applied to design, it is supposed to create balanced layouts that are more pleasing to the eye. You’ll probably have seen the Golden Spiral before.

I started out by redrawing the proportions in Adobe Illustrator. You draw a square, duplicate it and lay it underneath the first. Then draw another square the height of the first two along side. Rotate all three together by 90 degrees and then repeat another square at the height of the group. Then keep going until you have as many proportions as you need. When I had finished, I ended up with this grid to use as a starting point.

All the squares grouped together and centralised.

I went about using the grid squares to reform the 3x3 favicon idea. All the while, taking care not to resize any of the proportions.

And here is the new logomark (right) compared with the old favicon version.

There’s no denying that new option breathes better. It’s hard to pinpoint why it’s more visually pleasing. Perhaps the clear space around the 3x3 squares frames the icon more neatly, or the added stroke weight to the outer border makes it bolder and more of a statement. But that’s the magic of the Golden Ratio.

I then just rounded off the corners ever so slightly to soften the whole thing a little.

The logo is so simple, surely someone has done it before?

You’d think so wouldn’t you?

I mean, it’s a 3x3 square pattern. Someone must have used this for a logo design already. But after an extensive search and Google Reverse Image lookup of my design, the closest in similarity I could find in logo format was for an app called 9square. And even then it’s only used as an app icon, which I think is broad enough of an icon design to not infringe on any copyright.

Even better, this design has so much meaning to me.

Firstly, it pays homage to my old logo, a sign that my company is evolving and improving. It’s a nice representation of a grid, something constantly used in design. It also resembles the format for the portfolio items on the home page of my website. Finally, and this bit is nerdy, it reminds me of the Rubik’s cube that forever sits on my desk. Something that I toy with when I’m conceptualising ideas for clients and to relieve a little stress.

It’s perfect for my business.

I then added the company name under the logo (appropriately spaced of course) in my favourite font Futura, which is currently used across my website. I kerned the letters a little and replaced the round full-stop with a square one to match the logomark.

Love it or hate it? Want something similar?

Did that get your creative juices flowing? If you’d like to know more about my process, or you need details of my pricing structure for your own company logo, then visit my logos pages, or just drop me an email at james@barnard.co and we’ll get started!

Edit: After I posted this animation to Reddit, I was torn apart for this logo. Read the comments, and my response here. Plus here’s a bonus Instagram post about dealing with negative criticism.