Services Provided
Tools Used
Brand Identity design
Competitive research
UI design
Adobe Illustrator
Figma
Project Overview
Tech leaders focuses on developing engineering leaders that can help start ups get off the ground. I was tasked with developing a brand identity for the company that would 1) instill trust with start up founders 2) attract up-and-coming tech professionals looking to grow their careers and 3) to express Tech Leaders and their values.
First, the Research
Before taking thinking about any design concepts, I familiarized myself with the space that Tech Leaders was looking to break into. Specifically, I looked to competitors and companies offering adjacent offerings and analyzed how they talk about themselves, how they present themselves visually, and similarities among them. Based on my research, most of the competitors chose a limited color palette with one vibrant signature color that was sprinkled throughout their designs. Overall, a slightly more reserved style was favored by competitors, which I noted.
My competitive audit for Tech Leaders documenting competitor strengths, weaknesses, and visual styles.
Document identifying who the target customer is, essentially figuring out who is Tech Leaders for?
The next component was the target customer themselves. There are two target customers with different goals for Tech Leaders: Start-up founders and skilled engineering professionals. I took to public resources to identify the demographic features of these groups to get a better understanding of how I might market them specifically. Senior software engineers tend to be in their later 30s, living in larger cities in the coastal US and may have some risk aversion to joining a start-up that might be slightly unstable. On the other hand, start-up founders are typically between 40 and 60 years old and juggle so much while they grow their early businesses. They, too, seek stability. Stability and unity became central concepts in my mind.
Finally, I had many conversations with current Tech Leader employees and leadership to understand what they desired for their brand, what they felt it represented, and how they wanted to be seen.
Exploration, Iteration
After collecting my research, I got to the fun part: making connections and brainstorming concepts.
I started with a few mind maps where I gave myself 5 minutes to write all the words I associated with Tech Leaders and the associations with those words. Then, after each session, I circled the ideas and words I felt were interesting to help guide myself in the next phase: logo design concepts.
For the logo, I wanted something professional and business-forward but still anchored in the technical nature of product development. So I played around with the T and L being interlaced. I also worked in coding brackets (commonly used for tags in HTML) to keep that air of software development alive in the logo design.
In the end, I came away with a few rough concepts to bring to the Co-founder, Todd.
Based on Todd's feedback and my own critical eye for my work, I continued iterating on concepts that he was drawn to.
As I narrowed down the concepts, I began second-guessing my ideas and questioning if the concept was strong enough to represent the brand. However, I kept pushing through and listening to feedback from stakeholders along the way, ensuring that the end product was to their satisfaction.
