AsciiDoc

While Markdown remains a very popular markup language, easily accessible to many people (in fact this very post is written in Markdown), it is not an ideal solution for some use cases, like deeply nested hierarchies within documentation or book publishing.

We were approached by the AsciiDoc Working Group, part of the Eclipse Foundation to design their new branding and website, as they were unsatisfied with past design they attempted.

---

More often than not we work on grassroot open source projects and help them establish their own identity. Here however we were working with an Eclipse Foundation project, a major organization in the open source world, owning various Trademarks, including AsciiDoc. We had to ensure we delivered everything necessary for the brand to work as part of the Working Group, website, trademark and file type icon.

Crafting the new brand

We wanted to get this right, so we did not rush straight into coming up with solutions, yet we rather focused on understanding our clients better and cultivating a trusting relationship.

In projects like these, we like to organize a brand workshop with all the stakeholders coming together. We conduct the workshop via a whiteboarding app (in our case FigJam) and allow people to voice their views and requirements by structuring the conversation around 6 key themes and how they believe AsciiDoc represents these themes.

Due to the constant dynamic of discussions and equal participation among the participants, the byproduct of achieving AsciiDoc’s tone of voice was a more transparent and trusting relationship with the people involved at AsciiDoc. As designers we need to listen more than we speak. While doing that brings us closer to the desired solution, it brings us closer to the people involved as well.

Soon we were able to pinpoint the tone of voice of AsciiDoc and how to present it to to the world. Beyond the tone of voice however, we also asked the workshop participants to tell us how the AsciiDoc brand should feel like, using a set of sliders representing different values determining the personality and look and feel of the brand.

Using that information led to interesting discussions among the participants, sparking thoughtful conversations and leading us through the visual exploration of the brand, most importantly its logo.

Through various stages of feedback processes, determining visual directions preferred by the working group, we concluded finally with the current AsciiDoc logo. The logomark resembles a D and A crossed out on its negative space; a simple yet effective interpretation of the AsciiDoc brand. Using freely licensed fonts Urbanist and Inter rounded up the visual identity as well, bringing a unique personality to AsciiDoc, paired with splendid readability, which was quite crucial for a markup language such as AsciiDoc.

Website

In parallel to the brand, we started a benchmarking process through the old AsciiDoc website, understanding information architecture and conducting internal interviews with the working group to gather requirements. We were impressed by the determination of the AsciiDoc team and channeled these conversations into an effective storytelling we could present on the new website one-pager.

Showing off abstract concepts related to writing is not easy. We relied on the developer and tech editor experiences and showed AsciiDoc in action with an interactive demo, highlighting its features as well as comparing it to other markup languages.

What we learned

With AsciiDoc we had the opportunity to design a new visual identity and storytelling from scratch and see it go live soon after. It was a valuable experience building the AsciiDoc brand with multiple participants in the working group, yet keeping the wider community in mind as well. In the end we were proud to have checked all of these boxes.