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A while back, we updated the Agent website with a new logo.
We like it, and I hope you do too.
But unless you were here before the update, you may not realize that it’s more than just a new logo. It’s a complete rebranding.
It was the journey to a new logo that brought it all about, so I thought I’d share some of that journey with you.
I want to thank Dan Taylor (www.rambledan.com) who created Agent’s logo. When Dan designed the logo for Scribble Industries, he asked all the right questions without trying to leap straight to a finished design, and I knew I wanted the same thoughtful approach again.
The origin story
Agent began life as unCRM, and its name arose from my difficulty finding a suitable CRM when I was working for a startup.
I wanted a system for the whole company to use, not just the sales team, and that meant it had to be as simple and as obvious as an address book. I wanted a CRM that wasn’t a CRM.
For a company in startup, every relationship is valuable. Some connections become customers, others employees, or service providers, or investors, or just vocal supporters.
If you have to know what role a contact will play before you can add them to a tracking system, you risk losing them.
Exploring “un-ness”
During initial development, we gave the website a placeholder logo:
My first discussions with Dan were about adapting this contact card icon to express the product’s “un-ness.” A contact card that was breaking out through its border, for example, or without borders, or expressed in negative space, or somethinge else.
Dan deliberately kept these early versions crude to help us focus on discovering a core visual idea.
He asked me about the product’s audience and competitors, and the need it met. In one exchange, he asked:
“If it’s not a customer relationship manager, then what is it?”
“It’s a contact relationship manager,” I replied.
“Which of those is most important,” he asked, “contacts, relationships, or managing them?”
A great question, but at the time I only considered it in the context of which of “C”, “R”, or “M” should be emphasized visually.
Turning the curve
One of the early ideas we played with was adding circles above the curves of the “n”, “m” and “r” to convey the idea of people and relationships.
But Dan kept running up against the impossibility of visual expressing what something isn’t.
For me, the name unCRM had a cheeky cleverness, like 7–Up’s Uncola ad campaign from the 1970s. But it began to sink in that before we went to market, unCRM would need a new name.
Nameless
Thinking we needed a logo that could survive a name change, I asked Dan for a version of that basic shape—a semicircle with a dot above it—that could be paired with any product name.
While I waited for the next round of sketches, I couldn’t stop wondering about possible new names.
One of Agent’s key features is the Agenda field, so I wrote down “Agenda” and, for some reason, “Agend” and a little further on, “Agent.”
The address-book insight
An ongoing discussion through this whole process was Agent’s appeal to users. That it should be “as easy to use as an address book” was key. But thinking about customer acquisition and retention, I realized that we could not expect users to abandon the features of their favourite Contacts app to gain Agent’s distinguishing features.
Agent had to be a first-class address book.
So, what is unCRM if it’s not a CRM? The answer was staring me in the face. It’s an address book.
And with that, I suddenly knew which letter, “C”, “R”, or “M”, was most important. It’s an address book, not for managing your contacts but for managing your relationship with those contacts.
That gave me the slogan:
With a clear statement of what the product is and what it’s for, the name and logo were suddenly unburdened from having to convey this.
When I returned to my brainstorming list, “Agent” immediately popped out. The name is dynamic and succinct—and it fits with our longterm feature plans. In a flash, the core logo idea was obvious.
Dan and I did an exhaustive review of possible fonts, debated whether or not to capitalize the “A”, and then tweaked the letterforms and made the subtle refinements that an experienced designer sweats over.
Creativity
Thanks to Dan, the entire journey was a great experience, and it reinforced my belief about all design—UI, graphic, industrial, et al.
Creativity is not about originality, inventiveness, or out-of-the-box thinking, while it can require them. At its core, creativity comes from taking the time to understand a problem deeply. It is a process of discovery.
If you skip the journey, you’ll just arrive at a destination you already knew.
If you’re curious about Agent, I invite you to explore the demo, or request a beta account.
Comments and feedback are welcome at info@scribbleindustries.com.
