How HAND became a BRAND

Startup company branding has little in common with cattle branding, but one goal is the same: the logo design should ideally be iconic - and recognizable from a distance. Simple, clean - something you can "live in" and be happy with for years (not that the cow was happy about it, but you get my point).

According to articles in TechCrunch and Forbes - corporate branding can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars for a freelance logo treatment, to $50,000 to $200K for a complex identity system. It's a process that can be intimidating, overwhelming, and potentially frustrating for new company.

Our own process at HAND (Human & Digital) was iterative, with a few different design ideas created and discarded along the way (e.g. - how do you say "HAND" in a logo without being too obvious or child-like? How do you work in the full name of the company "Human & Digital" and still make it iconic?)

Eventually, a strong idea emerged from our world-class designer Misha P - who thought carefully about the name of the company - and the need for a iconographic representation of the name and logo "lockup" as the start of our company's identity design system.

We went through a guerrilla branding exercise, trying to organically ideate and riff on the values of the company, and the words that we want the company to represent. We used the Brand Deck from SimpleHonestWork . In the Brand Deck is a set of cards that contain descriptive words (one on the front, and one on the back) that force you to choose between "You Are," "You Are Torn," "You Are Not," and "Does Not Apply" (N/A).

Designed to make the branding exercise easier and fun - the Brand Deck forces a new company to make choices about the intended, aspirational voice of the company from an early stage. While there are many words in the deck that are interesting and close to the mark (and sometimes the words on each side are not 180 degrees opposite in meaning to each other, but just a subtly different articulation of the concept), your goal is to find the most appropriate words. Finding a corporate identity should feel intuitive - like the "Flow State" of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - and that's exactly how the Brand Deck works.

After an initial card sorting and stacking, we narrowed it down to a short-list of eight "You Are" words that represent the aspirational identity our new brand.

We then shared this with our designer, who right away understood the connective and relatability power of the name HAND - and why it's a "Think Different"-type contraction of the full name "Human & Digital" - or "H and D" - like how the RAND was once called the "R & D Corporation" - and converted eventually to simply - RAND.

In our first coffee meeting, Misha immediately imagined the connective power of the ampersand - our chosen "&" glyph (with a fascinating history) - and how it could be melded with the open, friendly palm as a way to invite folks into learning about our story. He began to sketch in pencil and paper that very day.

The initial drawings brought together what we could not imagine without a proper designer's mind. That mash-up of familiar and new, the articulation of a name - as symbol - and the connotations we wanted it to convey (not going to go all semiotics here) was the grail.

We'd looked at other hand icons in history - some of them loaded with connotations (and cultural messages) we liked - and some we definitely wanted to avoid - like the Hamsa, the Mountza, etc. The goal then grew to make sure we didn't inadvertently symbolize or signify something offensive or distracting from our new brand identity.

Once it became a digital project in Adobe Illustrator, every pixel could be manipulated (see what I did there? ;)

After a few iterations, reviews, suggestions, and all pixels properly flexed to their optimal locations of curvature and linearity - all negative and positive spaces defined - we had something amazing and, dare I say it, iconic?

In the logo and type-treatment for HAND - I can see positive messages like openness, strength, friendliness, and a clean approachability. A balance of the human hand, the digital glyph ampersand, and something beyond words - which is how a logo should feel. Tell us what you see and your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading!