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After our first round of product testing, we decided to make big changes in the look of our Infovark product. This is the first of an occasional series of posts about the design of the Infovark Beta.
We use the Infovark mascot — we call him “the Vark” — to represent our company. We use his head for our avatar in twitter and as the favorite icon for web bookmarks.
I like the simplicity and abstract look of the icon. It has a certain Scott McCloud less-is-more aesthetic to it. As Scott explained in his book Understanding Comics, the less detailed an illustration is, the more it invites the viewer to use their imagination to fill in the gaps. The more detailed a drawing, the more it represents a particular thing. We wanted Infovark to be about you, the knowledge worker, and not about us, Gordon and Dean, two guys making software.
We also chose an animal mascot for a reason. The Infovark name was partly an accident, but it stuck because it was a useful metaphor for us. Infovark does a lot of work in the background for you. It watches files, catalogs email, indexes content, and other useful things automatically. We liked the image of an animal digging through your information, trying to find interesting items and making associations between files, contacts, and email. It made our software feel friendly and helpful, like an enthusiastic pet you’ve taught to do neat tricks.
For round two of our product design, we wanted to try giving the Infovark just a little more personality. But not too much personality. Ever since Microsoft introduced Clippy to the world — and to much popular scorn — software developers are mindful about overeager assistants. Does anyone remember these guys? It’s a fine line that we’re walking here…
So after much consultation, this is our attempt at something a little cuter, with a touch more detail.
What do you think? We’ll use this new character on our redesigned blog theme, and possibly in the product itself. Leave a comment and let us know your thoughts!
Our mascot, the aardvark, is a popular animal. Recently, we discovered another software project using an aardvark mascot. That got Gordon and me thinking about applying for trademark protection. After all, we registered the domain name and signed up for Twitter and GetSatisfaction accounts. It makes sense to register our name and logo, too.
While trademark registration is more expensive than domain name registration, it’s still very reasonable for small businesses. Trademark registration costs vary depending on whether you do it yourself or have a lawyer file it for you. We opted to have a law firm file for us. It saved us some time and paperwork.
We submitted our application two weeks ago, but we didn’t use our original logo. Instead, we used our new and improved version.
As part of our UI redesign, Amy suggested that we make a few changes to our logo. Now we really like our logo, but we thought we’d entertain a few ideas. The new look of our application keeps many of the same colors, but is much brighter and bolder. Amy felt that we needed a friendlier, chunkier font for the logo, rather than the refined Avant Garde. Here’s the original logo:
We’d also noticed that people tended to misspell Infovark in all sorts of interesting ways. People often wrote our company name like “Info Vark” or “InfoVark” instead of as Infovark. I thought the two-tone color scheme used by the text might be at fault, so we decided to make the letters all one color.
Our original logo also implied a lowercase “i” for the company name, with the dot of the “i” being the Infovark’s head. We liked the friendly, unpretentious feel of the lowercase “i”, but after a few months of fighting automated spell check in email and documentation, we decided to go for the path of least resistance. (We are building an easy-to-use productivity tool, after all. having to mess around with funky capitalization ran counter to our mission.) That meant that we wanted the “I” in Infovark to appear in upper case. The easy fix was to make the critter all one color and the text a different color.
So after all these tweaks, our new and improved logo looks like this:
I’m really pleased with this version. It’s amazing what a dramatic improvement those little changes make.
Oh, and for my fellow type nerds, the new font is Whitney from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.
We’re in the process of registering a trademark on the new logo as well as on the Infovark name. That means that in 4-5 months, assuming we pass examination, we’ll be able to use the “circle R” ® symbol. For now, we can use the trademark symbol, ™.
It’s tedious and pedantic to use these symbols everywhere, so you won’t often see them on the site. But for the record: Infovark™.
I’m really fond of our logo. It conveys all of the attributes we want for our software: friendly, helpful, simple, and organic. Both Gordon and I are determined to make usability one of our primary concerns, and the logo is an inspiration. Our thanks go to the designers at Logoworks, who took our vague ideas and turned them into the graphic you see below.
Figure 1: The Infovark logo.
Over the next week or so, we’ll rework the website to reflect the infovark color palette and style elements. Stay tuned.