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I have recently completed a new identity and thought I would share the experience. The aim is to follow my design process from start to finish and to serve as interesting reading for the design community. This month, I have taken a look at troove, a company which provides a management system to small businesses. They offer a high quality product and I was excited to be on board for the launch.

troove is a company based in Mountain View, CA. They originally started out as a search engine to allow the user to find structured business applications for download, hence their name, which is a variation of the French word ‘trouve’, meaning ‘to find’. Recently however they have evolved their business and created a management system in software format and are now selling this directly to their clients and aim to eventually grow to providing a full management service to small businesses. Their website is www.troove.net and they will soon be launching the new site design. For their new brand, the team at troove approached me to provide a logo using simple lines and shapes, which would be a strong brand, reflective of the name of the company, which was modern and comprehensive. After brainstorming some synonyms connected with the word ‘find’, I chose to pursue the idea of discovery.

With a main idea decided upon, I started sketching ideas based on images which portrayed discovery. The main images were a magnifying glass, which I discarded after testing as I didn’t think it had a very unique look to it, and space - discovery of the unknown. The idea of space led me to astronomy, I chose to focus in particular on stars and a telescope. Below is an excerpt from the projects mood board.

As there are countless forms in which stars can be shown, I wanted to explore different styles - 3D, 2D and with shading gradient. Below are some early sketch ideas. 

I also liked the idea behind the company’s tagline - find what you seek. I explored the idea of finding something and this is an early idea of something you can hold in your hand, inspired by the phrase “finders, keepers”. I later discarded this idea as the actual items the user was exploring were not physical therefore it was not entirely relevant to the branding.

I then realised that the star alone was missing something therefore looked at simplifying an image of a telescope to continue the theme of discovery. Below are some sketches showing the different ways in which the two images could be coupled.

I also looked at an alternative with multiple stars but I felt this was too complicated and would not sit neatly with the text of the logo. The concept for having many stars in this composition was to also create the letter ‘T’.

I was happy with the two images to form the symbol but was sure that only one star was required. I simplified the star shape down to match the style of the telescope. After finishing the sketches of this, I transferred this to a dot grid book and then scanned into the computer. Below you will see the logo construction where I use the Adobe® Illustrator® to make the shapes geometrically correct.

Once the symbol element was finalised, I worked on a custom typography based loosely on the curves displayed in the symbol. The image below shows the evolution of the typography through the different stages.

The final version of the new logo was presented as below. Their new identity captures their history together with a forward thinking strategy. The client was very happy with the creative approach.

“I love so many aspects of the logo—elegant, sleek, modern yet somewhat retro.“

I would like to express my thanks to the client and hope that you have enjoyed my design process. Should you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave a message.