Designing the LEVEL Logotype
Every step, sketch, iteration and refinement that led us to the final logotype for our most recent publication, LEVEL.
Since early 2019, Medium has launched seven new anchor publications, and each of those publications has a graphic identity designed to support the subjects they cover and the unique characteristics that each represent.
The most important component of each of these identities is the logotype. Here we’ll take you through each step of the process of designing the logotype for our most recent publication, LEVEL, which launched in late November of 2019. We’ll show (almost) every sketch, iteration, refinement, and hopefully shed some light on how something that may appear to be relatively simple and straightforward is the result of an involved and detailed process.
But first, a brief preface:
For those unfamiliar with the design jargon, or for those who may just need a refresher, a logotype is a logo composed of type, as opposed to a logomark which is a logo made from an icon. You can combine the two elements into a lockup.
These graphic elements, in some combination, form the core of most visual brand systems. And, while they’re not meant to, nor can they be expected to communicate everything about a brand, they certainly are meant to be a clear distillation of brand qualities and signal to the user what the brand is and stands for.
For Medium’s publication brands, we generally stick to just the logotype, and do our best to ensure that there’s a strong sense of memorability and ownability through the typography alone. We think this gives our pub brands a clear editorial feel, and that incorporating a logomark, in most cases, feels too much like a product or corporate identity.
Step 1: Defining brand personality attributes
Every identity design project begins not with sketches or anything particularly visual, but instead with asking questions, doing research and working to document and understand what the brand represents. After all, if the logotype is meant to be a distillation of brand qualities, you need to be sure that you know what those qualities are and have alignment on those qualities with the project’s stakeholders.
That very first step in that process is a light brand questionnaire that we send to the EIC of the pub, in LEVEL’s case the amazing Jermaine Hall, where we ask them some relatively basic questions about the mission of the pub, who the pub is for, how they would describe the pub in just a few words, and what they feel sets the vision for their pub apart from things that exist in the world already. This information is the basic foundation for how we being to shape the brand.
There’s a lot of discussion, notes, highlighting and synthesis that springs from these responses. Two of the more tangible and important bits that come next are the brand vocabulary list, and ultimately the the brand personality attributes. The brand vocabulary is a simple is/is not matrix that provides the ways in which we talk about the brand.
The brand personality attributes are the most important component of this phase of work. It’s these attributes that ultimately inform the directions we take and decisions we make when exploring various visual representations of the brand, such as the logotype.
Step 2: Early ideas & sketches
Once we have alignment and buy-in on the attributes and foundation of the brand, it’s officially time to start translating those ideas and words into shapes and pretty things. The early phases of this step aren’t always exactly tidy or pretty, though. We try to go as wide as possible, exploring as many ideas and directions as possible, and then hone and refine over and over.
Now, time to get a little less talky, and a little more showy.
A few of these early ideas were weeded out, and a few others made their way into our first design presentation, which you can find here.
After talking things through with the group, we found ourselves most drawn to these few sketches, which then provided the fodder for our next round of explorations.
Step 3: Slightly more focused sketching
For this step, we set to expanding and exploring what we thought were some of the key themes and qualities that the group was seeing and resonating with from the first round of sketching. Things like extended sans serifs, sturdy and strong letterforms, and some funky shapes here and there.
We also made sure we didn’t close ourselves off to new ideas, so if there was anything that maybe didn’t have roots in the first presentation but felt good, we pursued it.
After an internal brand team review, we decided on a few selects to include in our 2nd presentation. The ones marked with a pink dot were our preferences.
Step 4: Narrowing in and refinements
Coming out of our second design presentation, we narrowed our options down to four directions, three from the 2nd presentation, and one that we just kept coming back to from way back in the initial sketch phases. The group found ourselves more interested in cleaner, angular, modern feeling directions, and moving away from things that felt a little too nostalgic or retro.
Once we get to this stage, we start to get into a lot of really granular refinements and detail work. We fuss about things like weight, letter spacing, balance, and how it will look at large and small sizes.
After a bunch of this type of iterating, we got things tidied up and packaged for our 3rd presentation.
In the end, though, there can only be one, and the winner was the the one we thought best embodied the LEVEL brand attributes that we defined earlier in the process. It’s the most straightforward and was also quite literally the most level option of the four finalists.
Step 5: Final refinements
From here, it’s about getting this one version exactly right. We had some concerns about how wide the logotype was, how that might make it a bit cumbersome in application, and also how it related in size the the other pub logotypes. Additionally, we took a pass at adding more thick/thin contrast to the letters, which added the last little bit of visual interest and memorability that we felt we needed.
You can see the logotype in action here.
Many thanks to Jermaine Hall and the rest of the LEVEL crew for being excellent partners throughout this process, and to Noah Baker, Renald Louissaint, and the rest of the brand and art direction team for their work and input throughout the process.
