Designing the logos for our two new products at Vendidit.
“Creating a system of products relating to their brand.”
For this project, I was tasked to create the official logos for our two new products: Upstream and GlobalSKU. My assignment was to create two professional logos in 1 week. I felt pressure because I wanted to get these logos perfect and was also working on other assignments during this week.
I had a lot of fun arriving to the final product. There were many twists and turns, and this document goes over them.
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The first step was to decide on what elements needed to stay the same between the logos in order to maintain brand consistency. I researched other brands with software tools including Amazon, AWS, Google Workspace, and Atlassian to see how they do it.
Next I analyzed the Vendidit logo to see how I could keep it consistent. My initial ideas were:
In the end, the cyan/indo checkmark gradiant stood out the most. As obvious as it sounds, I decided that would be the most familiar element to be included. This wouldn’t work at times where the logos needed to be rendered in one color, but some sacrifices had to be made and I decided it wouldn’t be much of a problem.
Upstream is a Return Management Platform. It sits upstream of the warehouse management system and helps facilitate incoming items, allowing the management of item locations within a warehouse.
The logo design was needed quickly as we had a client lined up to use the software, and our devs wanted to place the new logo on the software before allowing access.
Initially, Upstream was going to be renamed Vendidit Upstream, but I found issues with this decision:
First, I couldn’t get the logo to work right with both names. Horizontally stacking them didn’t look right, and putting them on the same line made the logo too wide.
Second, we had other products such as GlobalSKU around the corner, and I wanted to set up our brand to house each of these as individual products, with room for future ones. I wanted the products to have unique, recognizable logos.
The original software simply used the text “Upstrēm”, which was terrible for SEO and brand recognition, leading stakeholders to rename it to Upstream. I tried other font variations, but really couldn’t go with anything. I decided to stick with the font on their original logo, but I needed to add the “a”. Given their font converted to vector and modified, I had to build an “a” as quickly as possible to meet the deadline. I used the Vendidit’s logo text color for Upstream’s to ensure further consistency.
The next step was to decide the Upstream graphics used for the logo. I wanted the design to appeal to the team who worked on it while maintaining the product’s identity. To gain some inspiration, I loaded up the RMS and started using it. Between certain screens, I noticed they used a spinning green box icon for their loading animations. I began with modifying this icon. First I rebuilt it and changed it’s colors, but it didn’t work well if it was one color, so I used its outlines.
I really liked the look of it. I was concerned it might look too similar to the dropbox logo, so I rebuilt a perspective version, but was unable to make a decision on what I liked more. The Upstream team needed this logo done asap, so given the time constraints, I picked my favorite and when with the isometric version.
Personally, I felt the final design was too simple and plain. Despite my concerns, the dev team was very satisfied with the end result.
Globalsku is an original Vendidit project started by one of my favorite colleagues. He was working diligently on it for months, and eventually the company decided they wanted to integrate it into the brand as one of our products.
The initial concept was a database containing pretty much every item, ever, trackable with a unique identifier known as the “GSKU”. It ended up being transforming into Vendidit’s answer to automating the creation of item manifests and enriching product listing data with AI.
Since I was prepping to build the Vendidit website, we needed an official logo for GlobalSKU, as it was using a placeholder logo.
GlobalSKU’s design process was a bit of a rollercoaster, so I’ll outline the process of my thinking.
I began with the “global” part of the name, which me think of our planet. I envisioned the globe with latitude and longitude lines. To avoid something along the lines of the world bank logo, I wanted these lines to be accurately portrayed in 3D. To get the 3D right, I created a sphere in blender and enabled the wireframe and exported a render:
I popped the globe render into illustrator and image traced it (converting it into a vector) and moved it into Figma. During this process, I decided I wanted a more minimal look anyway, so I removed many of the latitude and longitude lines and went with fills instead of outlines. I was satisfied with how it was coming along.
With the “SKU” part of the name, I immediately thought of a magnifying glass since the product involves searching for SKU info. I started with adding a magnifying glass to the globe. It started to feel like a generic global search logo. I was very satisfied with the look of the rightmost version, despite the colors not matching. I kept it as a placeholder.
Googling “SKU” yielded a lot of barcode image results (despite barcodes usually correlating with UPC numbers). I ditched the magnifying glass for now and experimented with adding barcodes over the planet. I started to use the subtract boolean operator to experiment with an effect similar to the Nvidia logo.
I wasn’t very satisfied with the barcode approach. With the barcodes alone, the search element felt missing, so I went back to the magnifying glass. I also began to realize that if the logo was made to be one color, the globe would look like a circle, so i started to move away from the globe lines and applied the Vendidit Checkmark gradient to the circle instead.
I started repositioning the magnifying glass around the center and started to like having it in the center. I had the idea to use the subtract effect on the globe and the result started to turn more into a recognizable logo appearance. I was very satisfied with the second to last result. My eureka moment was when it dawned on me that if I removed part of the circle outline near the end of the magnifying glass, the logo began to look like a rotated G. This was the winner.
I was satisfied with this direction, but it felt too generic and hollow. Something was needed to tie the whole thing together. I thought about how the magnifying glass represented looking something up. So if we’re looking up SKU information, then why not put the SKU element inside the magnifying glass. I combined the barcode concept with the magnifying glass:
The text was relatively simple. I already had in mind how it was going to look, but I didn’t have time to build anything unique font-wise as the deadline was the next day. As plain as it sounds, I thought the logo looked great in Poppins, especially with “SKU” bolded. Some of the concepts were stacked, but I decided to keep it on one line to match the other logos. Like with the Upstream logo, I matched the text color with the Vendidit logo for consistency.
I was extremely satisfied in the results I was able to acheive in such a short time. They correctly aligned with the brand design, yet contained elements that made them unique.
I'm always looking for new projects, able to learn quickly, and can adapt to any challenge thrown my way. Feel free to reach out and chat with me about any projects you're trying to complete.
Here's some other projects I've worked on:
