Right before the end of 2023, I spoke with our Visual Design Lead Ergi. Anything from unforgettable logos, to compelling visual storytelling to creating a unique visual identity, you can be sure it bears Ergi’s handwriting. He has been with Ura for more than 5 years. In the following conversation, he introduces us to his creative process, sheds light onto the myths of logo design, and what design collaboration looks like. Finally, he explains why we at Ura should integrate the Open Source Community more systematically into that process.

Ergi

Creating Something out of Nothing

Marit: Do you find yourself in moments where you explore something out of nothing, and how does that work for you?

Ergi: For me, it’s tough to start from nothing. I don’t think it’s a good start to start working when you have nothing to work with, no material, no requirements and no first ideas.

Marit: What would you do then?

Ergi: In this case, I’d gather lots of materials and talk to the stakeholders especially if we’re working for a client. If it’s an internal project, it’s a different process.

That’s why for me it’s easier to work with a client. I have a point to start from. So in this case the process would start with asking as many questions as I can, by conducting a video call, or we at Ura now use a Visual Identity Form. This would be a questionnaire where we list all the questions that we have, and send it to the client for them to fill out. Based on their answers, we gather all the information and build a creative brief.

Marit: Besides the creative brief that you described, what other materials do you gather to start off from something?

Ergi: Sometimes, it’s a good idea to ask for examples that they visually like or to mention similar initiatives so we can get a good idea of what they’re expecting as it’s hard for many people to find the right words of what they are looking for. After that, we start the research phase, building mood boards, gathering images, collecting various materials, and researching competitors/similar projects.

From Gathering to Preparing to Trying Out

Marit: How do you know when to stop gathering?

Ergi: You should stop somewhere. You recognise patterns when you have worked with clients for many years. You know that sometimes you need to stop the exploration phase because your time is limited.

When I started working in this field, I used to spend a lot of time just researching, creating different mood boards, and designing different directions that may not work. But I needed to see them until the end, designing more and more logos within one direction, only to find out that the direction did not work. But now with experience, I understand when one direction is not a good direction to explore further, I reevaluate it and start exploring another direction.

Marit: How does this moment of knowing and changing, or abandoning feel for you? Can you describe that?

Ergi: Abandoning, in this context, is a part of the design process. I’m not sure if I can describe it, but it is always part of the creative process, regardless if it is illustrations or even music, which I do in my free time. When designing, I realize it’s not heading in the right direction, duplicate it, and keep exploring until I find that sweet spot, adjusting things along the way.

It is as if it was in the back of your head where all creative thinking is at work. Of course, I would like to explore a lot more all the time, but with experience, I started taking other factors like a limited timeline or budget into account, and it helps to understand and to abandon the current direction.

This part of the process is sometimes not motivational. We are often limited and unable to do deeper explorations based on the allocated time the projects have.

Flows and Limits

Marit: The flow that you describe, how do you manage to develop it while being careful not to spend too much time, and to respect the allocated time? How do you negotiate with yourself?

Ergi: It’s difficult to be precise on that, of course. But one thing that helps is keeping this in mind when I start exploring. I can see that there might be some different design paths and I know that some of these paths will take more time to explore than the others. So I focus on being selective and start with the directions that are simpler, and easier to explore.

For example, when I am designing a logo, we brainstorm three to five concepts that may be related to the project. These concepts will be translated into visual elements that can be part of the logo. For new initiatives, we recommend the logo to be visually representative of the project, literally or in an abstract way. I gather these elements and start to explore different visual combinations of them, always with the intent to design a logo that works.

Marit: What makes a logo a logo actually?

Ergi: I think that when designing a logo, there are two sides to accommodate: the creative part, and the functional part. The functional part is what really, really matters. It’s fundamental. Regarding the creativity and the creative concepts behind them, sometimes they’re not very creative, or not very original. Sometimes you hit the jackpot. You might have a combination of elements in such a way, and you create something that’s very original. And you start wondering, has somebody created this logo before?

Marit: So I’m wondering if I understood you well regarding the functional aspects of the logo. Would it be correct to say that you start with the functional aspects of the logo first?

Ergi: I think every logo should be scalable, flexible and recognisable. Usually, when a logo is original, it is recognisable. With that in mind, you can design logos that “work”. A logo doesn’t need to be „wow“, it just needs to work as a logo. I think this is the most important part because it is often mistaken for art. It is not art. It should be functional and achieve its goal, which is to visually represent a project. It is a challenge in the open source community with many people volunteering on one hand and without a design background or the ability to financially support an agency on the other hand.

Most projects start with only one person and they do the logo by themselves or with the help of someone from the community. Usually, they want logos to be very descriptive. I agree that it’s a good idea to be descriptive because they need to give users some information about what it is about. I have seen logos that have too many visual elements, then they become cluttered and fail the logo principles. At that point, it becomes an illustration, rather than fulfilling the functional aspects I mentioned.

Making Cocktails of Symbols

Marit: Coming back to the elements of the logo that represent the function of the software product. Who decides which elements should make it into the logo, and which not?

Ergi: Sometimes the client might mention it in the very first conversation, usually they are concepts they want to include. It is our duty to translate them into visuals. For example, it might be concepts like “Humans“, „Technology“, and „Sustainability“. We would attempt to translate them into visual language, looking for various symbols used for these keywords. When we talk about sustainability or recycling, we know what elements are usually used to translate these concepts. So we start from there. Of course, I would not like to use them as they are as it wouldn’t make the logo very original. But you can get one shape from a symbol, one color from the other, and you can translate the combination of these concepts into an original logo mark. You start merging, in a sense making cocktails of symbols to see what fits well.

Trying out Directions, and Sending Proposals

Marit: So you prepare yourself to work on a logo by looking at existing representations for „Sustainability“ or „Recycling“ to inspire yourself, then make something new, and with growing experience, this exploration has become much shorter?

Ergi: Correct.

Marit: What happens then?

Ergi: At Ura, we have a process that we can adapt based on what the project needs. After gathering information, building a creative brief, building mood boards, and exploring logos, we usually propose between three to five designs. We try to be selective, that is, even if we have developed more concepts, we still send out the ones we think work best. We have had this problem before where we would send logo directions, including one that we believed didn’t work quite well, but could resonate with the client, and then the client ended up choosing exactly that one. We would have to convince the client about another direction. So after proposing the first logo directions, we usually need to do a second iteration and continue exploring again. Only now we are more focused on the direction chosen by the client.

The ideal case: we send three directions, and we call them directions because in a way they’re paths. They do work as logo proposals but with the probability to make changes and offer more iterations later, working as a filter which helps us on what style to focus.

Marit: So once you are not questioning the whole direction anymore, what does that mean for your working process?

Ergi: Usually there are elements like the colors, the shapes, small refinements, changes in the typography, etc. I remember designing a logo for a browser focused on censorship-resistant browsing: We sent five logo proposals and they selected two as their favorites. So after that, we sent two for each, so four other proposals, based on these two directions. One direction had the shape and the element inside, the other direction did not. Small variations to see what works better.

Retrieving Client Feedback

Marit: When you send out directions or proposals, do you also consult the client as to why a proposal would work better than another one? Are you making a design critique of your own creation, making that transparent to the client so that they can make more informed decisions?

Ergi: We don’t have a fixed approach for that for every client. When presented in a meeting, we usually explain the proposals and the thought process behind them. As we send our proposals, the template that we have designed for the presentation includes a logo breakdown for each proposal that would describe the elements that have been used in this logo.

Retrieving Community Feedback

Marit: By now, we went through your creation process of the visual design. What is still missing from your perspective?

Ergi: For final logo decisions, we should consider involving the open-source community more systematically. We have done it before sporadically.

Marit: Do you know how we should do that?

Ergi: Where do we find this community? And how do we gather their feedback? I’ve never done it personally. But similar to any other feature or product ideas, there are several ways of getting feedback and the question is to find the right users and apply the right method.

We should consider that even when we are formulating the tasks that we will list in an application to funders such as the Open Technology Fund. We should consider that as an extra step and remember to not underestimate how unpredictable visual design can be.

In that sense, the feedback of the community could become part of the material that constitutes the gathering and preparation step of the design process. I think it is the way that it should be done in fact when we talk about open source design projects.

Then it is truly open-source design.

Marit: Thank you very much for this insightful conversation, Ergi.