The Journey of a Brand
Rebrands can happen for a variety of reasons. The most likely ones including staying relevant to your audience, differing context, internationalization, or for company growth — the feel for something that represents the modern version of yourselves.
At Appbot we’ve gone through a paradigm shift that covers quite a few of these, but there was one major shift that had a significant impact.
From the outside, it was seen as clean and fun but internally it set the entire standard for how our company acts. More on this later.
First, let’s start from the beginning.
Part One: In The Beginning
When I joined Appbot, our logo was this.
A pretty fun logo created by Stuart Hall, one of our co-founders when Appbot was just a little side project of his. It showed the tone Appbot would set to the outside — playful, colorful, and hinted at the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning side of our tech.
However, there were a few downsides:
- It was only good on white/light screens
- The claw got pretty indistinguishable at smaller sizes
- No one really understood why a claw
Part Two: A Quick Refresh
I was initially hired as a freelancer to design a new homepage for Appbot. They were rapidly growing and wanted a bit more modern vibe in the public eye. We didn’t have the budget or the time for a full redesign that included the logo, so I did what I could with the older logo to make it better fit with the website and brand positioning.
We kept the same font as I thought it was modern enough, but gave it a slight color change, cleaned up the alignment, and made it properly one word. The claw became simplified. This worked really well with the refresh homepage and got a lot of love.
Part Three: The Mascot
This is where things took a turn, in the best way possible. We finally had the time to commit to a proper refresh of our brand.
I initially started with creating the logotype — a simple but long journey of experimenting with hundreds of typefaces and custom lettering.
After coming up with something that ticked all the boxes and that myself and the team loved, we focused our attention on the elephant in the room. We had lost a bit of the fun with the new logo. We lost a bit of ourselves.
Of course, we thought we could bring back in the claw, or try a few other ways to show off the tech-side, but I ended up just messing around with a little mascot of sorts. Similar to that of Duolingo.
This is when ‘Pogo’ was born, and he became part of the logo — our little robot sidekick. Everyone was stoked — we had found the missing part of what we wanted to show to the world. We launched the updated brand and it was a great success. We even had the majority of customers comment about Pogo in support emails and showed their love for our new lil guy.
The anatomy of Pogo wasn’t rocket science, his shape was inspired by the shape of an app icon. We tried many alterations, but settled on this mismatch of an antenna, one wheel and arms shooting up in an excited manner… there was no reason why we did those things, it just felt right. As soon as we created him, he took on a personality. He became something like WALL-E — how can one little robot illustration show so much emotion without a face… It was odd, but we rolled with it (pun intended).
What spawn from this became the heart and soul of Appbot. We started making different versions of Pogo for any situation within the product.
We named our various account details after him. Our internal design system is aptly named after him — Boing. We all had our own “bot” names. I was Pixel Bot, our amazing marketing/growth focussed co-founder was named Magic Bot for the magic she would weave, our other co-founder (and solo CEO at the time) was Chief Bot. We had Code Bot, Refactor Bot, Backend Bot. All of a sudden we had our own internal verbiage, all this from a simple robot illustration.
Part Four: Bringing Pogo into the Future
After having multiple years with Pogo, we felt like he could use a bit of a cleanup. After all, he was only created within a few hours initially, and that return on investment was huge.
Pogo made his way into the land of three dimensions.
And of course, our personal bots got a refresh.
This little change once again had a massive impact. It gave our product more depth, our marketing material more fun, our team more… joy.
Part Five: Gone but Not Forgotten
This brings us to today. You might think after all of that success internally and externally that we’d be crazy to scrap Pogo — but there are a few reasons why.
Our new logo is still familiar but as Appbot has matured, so have the different needs for our logo. Pogo is great, but he only works on a small number of backgrounds — and sometimes we can’t control this, especially when used by external companies or media, and a brand user manual can only get you so far.
We’re wrapped with where we’ve ended up.
Also… Pogo isn’t gone! I’m not sure if he ever will be. He’s just moved out of the limelight but is still the heart of soul of Appbot. He pops up in our marketing, helps onboard users, and is still a massive part of the internal team.
Thanks for coming on this journey with me 🎉
