The story behind our visual identity
This week we have celebrated Helsinki Pride which is the biggest cultural and human rights event in Finland highlighting the importance of promoting equality and non-discrimination between people irrespective of sexual orientation or gender.
We stand behind these values and want to highlight that we do not discriminate people based on their Power Platform skills either.
Many have shown their support for the Pride movement by updating their profile pictures and logos in different social media channels to use rainbow colors.
For us, however, at the beginning of this week, our company icon / symbol, was still in the works. As we then got it finalized, we noticed that we would like to share with you the story behind and how come it took 6 months since our launch to get it done.
Briefly said, just like rainbow colors stand for the values behind Pride movement, our company visuals are presentations of our values.
Story behind our main logo
Drafting the main logo was essential part of our company launch activities. There were hundreds of iterations and the review process included family members and other stakeholders.
Below a couple of examples of the (as already mentioned) hundreds of ideas which we played around with.
We reviewed and iterated for multiple weekends, often crazy hours and some of us were thinking that is this getting a bit out of hand. Are we a bit too perfectionists to try to include so much of our company core into a single visual presentation, our logo.
But it was all worth it.
The final version of our logo truly presents our company core values, the passion of forever going forward and continuously learning. Therefore Forward is highlighted and red is of course the color of passion. The letter A is also modified to resemble a minimalistic arrow pointing to the direction we want to take our team and our customers. You guessed it, the answer is… Forward.
At the end we did not want to fall into visual gimmicks and preferred minimal ageless design. Because even though we shall continuously go forward and evolve as a company, we want to have our core visual elements reminding us about our roots.
Story behind our icon / symbol
We decided to exclude any icon or symbol elements from our main logo and have a separate visual element to function as such. This ended up being even more thorough planning process than with the main logo. Therefore it took us 6 months to get there. Obviously it was not our top priority and we have been focused on building our processes, products and serving our customers, but we got more and more pressure to get it finalized as the company icon / symbol is not only required at social media profiles, but in many other places too which our main logo did not suit that well.
This time it took more than 500 design ideas and iterations because in a company icon, you can use heavy graphics which widens the array of possibilities. But this also puts more weight on the end result. We needed to get it right.
Both our customers and we ourselves as well, often refer to us as “FF”. So we wanted that to be present in the logo. But finding a suitable minimal and ageless design which combines the passionate red arrow from our main logo, our core value of always going forward, combined with letters “FF”, ended up being a longer than expected rollercoaster ride. But we got it at the end.
This time we are not going to show the draft designs. They all pale in comparison to the final version.
So, as Helsinki Pride pushed us to finalize our company symbol for the years to come, we are now happy to show our support for the cause with our own “Pride” version of our brand new logo, Equality Forever!
