In August 2015, I had a conversation with my friend Ry and agreed to start working full-time on an enterprise data startup he was co-founding, called Astronomer. I’d known Ry for a few years and he was an advisor for my own startup and someone I admire. I joined the Astronomer team on the spot. My first task: redesign the Astronomer logo.
August 18, 2015
10:35 AM
It was a Tuesday, my first day at Astronomer. First, I created a new folder in Dropbox called “Astronomer” and added one file to it: investordeckv6.key, a recent pitch deck showing the current logo and visuals I was to replace:
10:41 AM
I saved my first found image into a new folder titled inspiration.
Typically, the first thing I do when starting a logo project is pore over the internet for inspiration. I spent the next two hours completely locked in, listening to music very loudly, zipping through www.designspiration.net and www.dribbble.com and collecting visual inspiration. I searched through keywords like “stars,” “space,” “galaxy” and so on and saved anything I found interesting — a font, a color, an illustration, a vibe, a tiny rounded corner, a building, a photograph, etc.
But first, I searched good ol’ fashioned Google for “astronomer.” I found one image worth saving: a painting from 1668 by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer titled The Astronomer (Wikipedia).
The following images are in order of when I saved them, starting with Vermeer’s 17th century painting:
12:37 PM
One hour of inspiration collection results: 11 images saved, hundreds more viewed.
At this point I fired up Adobe Illustrator and started messing around with fonts, colors and shapes based on bits of inspiration from these 11 images (and every random, space-themed thing I’d ever seen, logged in a massive inspiration folder in my brain).
I don’t typically do much sketching by hand nowadays though I had a voracious appetite for drawing as a kid. A recent conversation with a friend, however, has inspired me to get back into the habit. I’m usually too impatient to sketch freehand, instead choosing to have millions of colors at my fingertips with Illustator.
I came into Astronomer’s new logo project with a few of my own rules:
- No telescopes. My first instinct was to illustrate a telescope. Makes sense, right? No. Be more creative, I thought.
- Use stars, planets, moons. An astronomer studies the universe; Astronomer Inc. studies the “universe of data.” Felt right.
- Be abstract with the visuals. The space theme is strong but can be distracting. A great logo is the right amount of distracting. When in doubt, subtle is better because simple is best.
- It’s Astronomer, Inc. not Astronaut, Inc. Don’t go overboard showing space suits and rockets but don’t be afraid to use them, sparingly. Astronaut imagery is really cool and it’s close enough, right?
3:13 PM
After a few hours of sketching in Illustrator, about half-a-day into my first day on the job, the first iteration of Astronomer’s new logo came to life:
The Visuals
It didn’t take long to break my first rule, about using a telescope. The gray circle and stars are a simplified illustration of what you might see peering through a telescope into a galaxy of stars.
One would not immediately interpret the logo as a view through a telescope but that was fine by me. The logo felt tidy as-is and the stars were easily recognizable. The circle holds the elements together neatly and I had a feeling that viewers would appreciate later that it was intended to represent a telescope (an easter egg of sorts). A friend and amazing designer once told me that a good logo should roll down a hill.
A quick note about rules: sometimes design rules should be broken, as outlined in Scott Dadich’s delightful DesignWrong theory, only after you’ve studied the rules and respect them.
The Font
I chose a font called Filmotype Fashion. Its wide letters seemed the right choice for a word wrapping around a circle. It is a beautiful font, from a collection of outstanding display fonts from the 1950s, called Filmotype.
While one of my rules was to not focus too much on astronauts or space travel, NASA’s Brand Guidelines Manual, published in 1976, was a huge inspiration for the logo and visuals. With its retro look, Filmotype Fashion feels like it was plucked right from those pages.
The Colors
I chose the main colors — dark purple and yellow — based on the space inspiration I found earlier in the day and my own observation that night. On the night of my first day I literally looked to the sky for inspiration. You might think a night sky is just plain black (#000000) though it is typically a variation of deep blue, gray, or purple.
I have continued to tweak Astronomer’s colors to this day, exploring probably a hundred slightly different shades of purple and yellow.
I chose the secondary colors (orange, blue, gray and white) without profundity. They complimented the purple and yellow well and I wanted this to be a colorful brand because I wanted to have access to a wide spectrum of colors for future brand assets.
3:23 AM (later that night)
By the middle of the night I was still awake noodling around in Illustrator, an all-hours-of-the-night activity I do too often. Earlier in the evening I mocked up the newly created logo for Astronomer’s Twitter page wherein I broke apart the word and telescope graphic to better fit horizontally inside the Twitter header image. I got rid of the “telescope” circle and sprinkled the stars (randomly, carefully) on either side of the word. This was the first iteration that night and it nearly resembles what we use today at Astronomer:
And that was the end of my first day at Astronomer.
August 19, 2015 (the next day)
1:11 PM
To be sure I did not miss a single bit of inspiration on the Internet, I went back in for another round. Same process as before.
2:14 PM
For fun I started searching through some incredible Hubble space telescope photos and I found an image of deep space that simply blew my mind. The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) image below is of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, a minuscule corner of the night sky about as big as your thumbnail. Everything you see in the image below fits inside that tiny region. The HDF was built from 342 separate images observed by Hubble over a ten day period in 1995. Read more about the HDF here.
The whimsy of colors and shapes in the HDF became a major piece of inspiration for Astronomer’s logo. I’ve attempted to capture the nature of this image with every iteration of the logo since.
August 24, 2015
4:02 PM
About a week into the job, I presented a Keynote to the Astronomer team, the first of daily, end-of-day presentations that came to be known as “Design Dailies.” I outlined the work I had done so far—basically, what I’ve shared with you so far in this post—and shared an updated version of the logo (in the middle below, alongside of the first version of the logo from August 18, 2015 and the most recent version I’ve been using as of March 16, 2016):
Fun
Of utmost importance was making the Astronomer logo fun. I latched onto this from the very beginning and it remains integral to Astronomer’s brand today. Because users of enterprise software are accustomed to utilitarian, often panfully bland experiences, I knew this was both a major opportunity and challenge. If Astronomer could create a brand and product line that is both powerful and fun we will have created something truly special in the enterprise space.
As I was starting to work on Astronomer’s logo and visuals last fall, Slack was just coming on to the scene as an enterprise product both playful and robust. Slack remains a big inspiration for its simplicity, fun user experience and, above all, its great utility. Our team uses Slack every day.
My Next Task?
Now that the logo and visuals are set (though I will certainly continue to tinker) my next task is to design the user interface for DataHub, Astronomer’s front end tool for customers, which is an opportunity I am relishing. DataHub’s visuals will be inspired by the logo and the logo will likely evolve because of the work on DataHub. Though a company’s logo and its product are not the same they’re inextricably linked as the foundation of Astronomer’s brand.
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Note: Because I initially had no intention of sharing the inspiration images publicly, I regrettably do not know who created each one. If you are the designer, or know him/her, please email me and I will add a caption.
