Logo 1.0 built for investor decks…and prophecies
While Vendia founders, Shruthi Rao and Tim Wagner admit they spent A LOT of time coming up with the name “Vendia” (short for Venn Diagram), they also admit they spent all of five minutes coming up with Vendia’s first logo. Tim, who was putting together an investor deck and claims to have “the design skills of an ant,” designed it in Google slides using default colors. He simply rotated two “V”s 90 degrees and overlapped them. Tada! Vendia’s first visual identity was born.
Even though it came together quickly, creating a logo is a milestone for any entrepreneur and founder. Like creating domain email addresses, or getting the first payment from a customer, each milestone makes the venture feel more real.
When Shruthi saw Tim’s logo, she knew it was meant to be. Years before she started Vendia, she had visited a fortune teller on a whim. The medium told her she would, “Start something where you are going to be connecting the whole world … I see lime green.” When Shruthi saw the lime green in the logo she was shaken. This was it—she was going to connect the whole world!
The first logo was short-lived, though. Shruthi and Tim hired an outside agency to build out the visual identity and website (another big step in launching a company!) and the agency noted that our logo looked a bit like barbed wire! Not super friendly or on brand for an organization with a mission built around sharing. Enter our immediately previous logo, a tomato and teal (or ‘chicken tikka masalacolored’ as Shruthi says) logo for a more mature, professional brand identity.
Logo 2.0 becomes 3.0 because we’re Kind Humans, after all
The new logo and identity took off, launched with a fancy new website, transferred to sales decks and social media profiles, and shipped on some might fine swag. We liked it!
But, it didn’t take long to see a few signals indicating it was time to reinvest in Vendia’s logo and visual identity.
- Most urgently, the new colors weren’t accessible. Part of Vendia’s Kind Human policy and culture is inclusivity. It was important to Shruthi and Tim, as well as the whole team, that Vendia Share was accessible to everyone. Our brand identity needed to represent that.
- Shruthi also knew the best logos are simple. The new logo was just a bit too complicated. Was the carrot-colored triangle on the top left? Top right? What did the bottom look like? It was all just a bit too much.
- Finally, Tim and Shruthi felt that Vendia’s brand no longer represented who we are. We are fun and candid. It’s a little whimsical and fun. We are approachable yet innovative. We aren’t some giant corporation distilling to the safest visual.
So, Shruthi and Tim asked our Head of Design, Hailey Nevins and the design team to revisit Vendia’s roots and bring the “fun” back to Vendia’s visual identity. The founders love where we landed.
Check out a behind the scenes look at Vendia’s creative process for our new logo and visual identity. Read more.
Here’s some final advice Shruthi and Tim would give to other founders navigating logos and visual identity development:
- Don’t overthink it, and don’t be afraid to put something of yourself into it. Yes, when you are creating anything new, get free advice. But trust you know best.
- It’s safe and easy to bow into a corporate look and feel. But, we lost something when we got so corporate. We lost our heart and the expression of our love for our customers. When you express that love, it’s only then can you create something beautiful and true.
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At Vendia, sharing is at the core of what we do. We envision a world where, through better sharing, people are freed to innovate and make a great impact on those around them. Everyday, we pursue our mission by building a revolutionary SaaS platform that unshackles customers from the burdens of IT, empowering them to focus on creating and running highly scalable, fault-tolerant, cross-cloud, multi-party, real-time data applications. Won’t you join us? Explore job opportunities