Up above are the final variations of the HNY (Hacky New Year) logo, this was collaborative effort between another designer and myself.
The development
Below are from my fellow designer as the where they left off in their HNY exploration, both the logo exploration and the potential site look each acted as my jumping board to being my contribution to the look and feel.
My exploration
Below are my logo explorations for HNY, first I rounded the top of the ‘H’ and the bottom of the ‘Y’ because I liked the friendliness it portrayed which was one of our goals in relation to HNY. Afterwards I played with color and contrast to find a logo look that was legible and reflected the inner values of HNY (which was to facilitate collaboration between different people in the company).
Below are my explorations for what the HNY site could look like, I was mainly focused on building a fun, energizing vibe that echoed different personalities coming together. The biggest concern our team had was to create a virtual event carried the same fun as the live in-person event held in previous years.
The first pass I went full color, what interested me from my colleague’ s first pass was the theme of the connecting line which is shown on the far left. From there I expanded on the idea by switching the colors to the AppD brand and then in the third image by adding round corners to the lines to echo the same roundness as the logo.
In my second pass I decided to invert my first pass by testing a paper grey background and having the connecting lines as the different colors. It still held the idea of representing different personalities coming together through the different sections connecting to each other. I tested mixing paper backgrounds and color backgrounds, to full paper background, and then testing line thickness.
Afterwards I tested the idea of a dark mode, because of my personal experience of choosing dark mode whenever its available for any platform or site, since I find that its easier on the eyes.
Ultimately we went more with the light mode in pass two as a direction (as I passed back the exploration to my fellow designer) however you can see that we kept some of the dark mode coloration for animations. In the final we decided as a team that the logo was cleaner if all the lines in the middle should be the same color and we went with the darker logo overall so that it would remain legible in smaller sizes. However we decided to use the full suite of AppD brand colors to swap out for the middle lines to echo our original intent of showcasing differences.
