Branding Lussumo

A few months ago, Mark O’Sullivan of Vanilla fame dropped my studio a line asking about a potential branding package for the new Lussumo open source community software suite. He had stressed the desire for something friendly and warm that had a very human touch. Mark explained that he had grown tired of his own approach to the identity of his Lussumo products and wanted to take a whole new one. Above is the final result of weeks and weeks of sketching, tracing, resketching, and retracing. After the jump, I’ll explain the process of branding Lussumo, one web app at a time.

Vanilla

Out of all the logos I worked up, the Vanilla was by far the easiest. I knew exactly what needed to be done and I did it. The whole idea behind Vanilla was that it had to look “delicious.” The software caused such a stir when version one was released because of the very fact that it had an almost dessert-like appeal. It was refreshing and intriguing, and it did the job for just about everyone. I did one or two thumbnail drawings and immediately jumped into an inked version.

As you can see from the original drawing, it didn’t really take much to get to the final product. If only all the logos went this fast.

Conversations

Conversations was much different in just about every aspect. Mark really liked my hand-drawn style and wanted the logos based off that whole realm of illustration. The only problem was that the word “conversations” was so long, it was next to impossible to figure out a compact way of illustrating it without it looking like a complete mess. Another issue was that Mark needed the logos to be able to scale relatively smoothly to 22 pixels in height for use in menu bars. YIKES.

In order to understand the logo, you must first understand the application. Conversation is a new private messaging program that has basically been pulled out of Vanilla and given its own platform. Now that you know that, you’ll understand that my thought process of using some kind of quotes as an integrated icon wasn’t the worst idea. Wow, I really thought I was wrong on that one. If you refer to the sketch above, you’ll see the absolute train wreck that was my initial sketch. Already by this point I was hanging off the terrace in back of my apartment awaiting my impending doom. I decided I should maybe give it more than one try and see what happens. That’s where the speech bubble idea came into play.

This was much better, but it killed me how cliche it looked. I’ve seen too many damn speech bubbles on the internet over the past five years to let this one slide. I tried again in slightly different styles to see if it made any difference.

It didn’t. So I slept on it.

After this sketch I felt much better. The idea here was to completely ignore the speech bubble idea and just go for some good, old fashioned hand-drawn script. I tried a few versions and then that damn speech bubble jumped in again, except this time I tried to incorporate the quotations somehow. The idea then turned into using two speech bubbles merged as one with tails on either side to simulate two people having a conversation, then I had the idea to make the tails mimic the placement of quotation marks and finally I was happy. Now it was time to vectorize and see what worked.

After messing around with all the concepts, it only made sense to go with the newest concept. Now it was time to move onto the dreaded Garden.

Garden

Garden is a framework with which you can build pretty much anything with the help of simple downloadable plugins. What does that mean? It means that the logo should demonstrate the ability to be interchangeable, to assume many different forms, to be functional even if all the pieces are different.

So obviously…this one didn’t turn out exactly as planned. Moving on…

There I go…back onto the terrace.

And it just kept getting worse from here. Finally I decided enough is enough and went back to the original plan, except this time I was going to take a different approach. I drew out the alphabet with every letter in a different illustrated style hoping that it would spark some sort of brilliant idea. Illustrator did its job and showed me that clean lines on a very rough sketch could work.

Great! Now we’re cookin’ — The only problem is that it doesn’t seem to read “garden” rather “garbage dump.”

In a desperate attempt at finding some sort of concept, I sent over the garbage dump idea to Mark to get his opinion. He too liked the alphabet but agreed that I wasted my time drawing letters. He did however tell me that he liked the style of the B, C, O, and Y and suggested maybe I take those styles a little further. Initially I was a little hesitant to do so because it broke away from my brilliant “throw a bunch of crap together and hope it comes off as clever” approach, but I gave it a shot.

Working of the style of the aforementioned O, I finally put together something I liked.

Now I was getting somewhere. I liked this version because it utilized the script that Mark mentioned and it was also fairly disjunct because of all the white breaks throughout. This satisfied my puzzle piece concept as well as the humanized script approach. The only problem was that it didn’t really match with the rest of the logos which put me right back at square one. Mark suggested just trying a nice hand written script that emanated vines, but simplified so that it was still as simple as the current round.

I drew many, many, many pages that looked exactly like this until I got each letter just right. When I brought a handful of them into Illustrator and started manipulating, it turned out that I had enough good line strokes to actually make something worth while out of the bunch. FINALLY! DONE!!!

Lussumo

Originally Mark wanted to brand the entire software suite AND rebrand the umbrella company, Lussumo, but once we finalized the other three logos, we decided that the Lussumo branding shouldn’t be in the same vain as the rest of the apps. As the umbrella company, we felt that it should have a more professional appearance and be able to interact with the other three logos without interfering with their style. If we were to use yet another hand-drawn logo for the ever present Lussumo name, then the software suite would basically lose all its character that we worked so hard to create.

“Lussumo” is a fabricated word created by Mark some years ago that explicitly means “Love You More” — A notion given to the fact that he put lots of love and care into each app he developed. The above version was our final choice and worked rather well. “Luss” was joined together by imaginary strokes, the following U was slightly bigger to induce an accent, and the MO was enlarged and almost overflowing to symbolize the word “more.”

Below are some sketches and ideas that led up to the final mark.

There was also a set of square and not-so-square icons designed to be used in certain situations.

Make sure you keep an eye on lussumo.com for the official debut of both the software and brand identity. I hope you enjoyed this overview of the branding of Lussumo.