Visual Identity of Vald
Case study of logo designs and design assets for OSS.
Introduction
With many OSSs available, a visual identity including logos is important to give originality to OSS created by each individual, and as icons to symbolize abstract functions of OSS. Today, we’ll show you how to make a visual identity for OSS, taking Vald as an example.
This post has the following 3 topics.
- Logo design
- Making visual guideline
- Creation and use of design assets
Logo design for OSS
You can see logo designs and brand colors of common OSS projects at Branding CNCF.
For example, Kubernetes took its name from a Greek word meaning a “Helmsman” or “Pilot,” and its symbol is a rudder. The icon has a uniform look, with the rudder motif representing the features that control and manage containers, and the blue key color creating an image of the sea.
Kubernetes also uses a ship motif in its logo design for Kubecon, the conference hosted by Kubernetes community. This is a successful example of using mutually related motifs that the audience can easily associate with each other. In this way, you can develop powerful, unified visual designs.
The origin of Vald name and logo design motif
The name “Vald” originates from “Vektor Wald,” which means a “forest of vectors” in German.
As the origin of the name is from the forest(Wald), the image of trees was naturally selected to the symbol motif. The shape of the trees represents a geometric image of a vector.
The associated image of “narrowing down search results” to the scene of “spotting what you are looking for in the dark” is taken into the logo. The sunlight filtered through trees was set as a key symbol of the Vald logo design.
We have chosen green color for the logo from the image of the forest. Because of having a Yellowish green impression with warmth, we added a taste of colder blue to strike a good balance.
We also defined a secondary green that can clearly be seen against the dark background. Using these two green colors, we gave a gradient to the Vald logo.
Making visual guidelines
We made visual guidelines that show color rules and the use of the logo design.
Setting visual guidelines helps developer team members and users to use brand assets correctly.
Vald design guidelines are composed of the 4 following things.
Color guidelines
- Color codes of RGB, CMYK, and Grayscale.
Color logo and monochrome logo
- How to use the color logo and monochrome logo depending on the background density.
Size and clear space
- A specific amount of space that the logo must have on all sides, and the minimum size.
Don’ts with the logo
- What not to do with the logo, such as changing the orientation and the aspect ratio.
Creation and use of design assets
We use the created design assets in the web landing page design and document pages, presentation slides, novelty goods, etc. For example, we use a number of illustrations that intuitively convey features of Vald on the document page, to make the content easily understandable.
It is useful to prepare uniformly toned icons based on the color guidelines so that you can use them in various scenes.
Lastly
Thank you for reading this post!
Since OSS itself is an intangible asset that has abstract features, logo designs and design assets that visually represent images are important. We hope that this Vald case study will be of help to those guys who are thinking of creating an OSS visual identity.
