Hive Company Branding
Created in spring 2023 for MEJO 482 (Media Design)
Prompt: You are a freelance graphic designer and you have just been contacted by a company that would like you to create a brand identity for them. It’s called Hive and is modern workplace productivity app similar to Asana or Monday.com.
To properly design the visual identity for either of these brands, you will need to consider a lot of different information. Included with the project material is a creative brief from each company that will give you basic information about the following: the project background, the objective, the target audience, and tone words.
Using what you learn from the brand’s project background, objective, target audience, and tone words—including doing research into companies who could be considered competition and seeing what their brands are like—build components of the brand’s visual identity that will need to be included in the final deliverable, a digital style guide.
- A brand-consistent front cover illustration featuring the title of the document.
- A mindmap that shows your visual idea development for the brand.
- A stylescape you have created that shows at least one user persona, the brand’s voice and graphic language. Include a description of your inspiration for the brand’s visual identity based on what you know about the market, the brand’s competition, and the brand’s targeted customers. How did you find these images and examples?
- A description of the colors you have chosen for the brand—What is the brand’s dominant/primary color? What informed your color choices? What are the relationships to the other colors? What emotions are you trying to ellicit and why? What tools/software did you use to pick the colors?
- 2 typeface choices for the brand and guidelines for their use.
- At least 10 sketches from your logo/wordmark explorations.
- The brand’s logo, either symbol-based or a well-developed logotype. There should be a description of how the logo was created, both full color and black and white versions, as well as any guidelines for use like clear space requirements, size/color restrictions, etc. Show all possible orientations of the logo.
- 5 examples of the brand’s design assets in potential “real-world” situations.
Final Product
Click the image below to be taken to the interactive PDF.
Logo Iterations
After doing my mind map (below), I knew I wanted to emphasize the bee imagery, but all my initial sketches felt much too cutesy, so I abandoned the bee shape itself. I really liked the idea of hiding the “H” from “Hive” in the logo somehow, which I played around with adding inside the bee’s body or even combining hexagonal-like letters into one single symbol. I soon turned to the honeycomb shape, because the geometry of the hexagon felt very technological, modern, and streamlined.
At first I played around with overlapping hexagons with yellow strokes and no fills to see what kind of shapes I could make. However, it felt too complicated, feminine, and elegant for a tech startup (image 1).
Next, I started to play a bit more around with color — specifically yellow, black, and varying tones/opacities in between those two to reincorporate the bee. However, these felt either too elegant or too biochemical-y to me (image 2).
Finally, I realized that I could create an abstract bee form by resizing, recoloring, and layering the hexagons. Many of these iterations utilized shapes that only had strokes, in the goal that the overlapping layers could create new shapes and feel even more technical and geometric. But once I started adding fills, I knew this was the right choice, because it’s much more pronounced and yet simple (image 3).
In the end, I went with a very simplistic but incredibly meaningful logo. It has only 4 shapes: 2 small yellow hexagons offset by 2 larger black hexagons, playing off the honeycomb shape to create a bee. They are separated by uniform white space, which subtly creates a futuristic looking “H” (the space between the two black hexagons creates the horizontal crossbar and the space between each yellow hexagon and the two black hexagons creates wide angles that act as the stems of the letter).
In my original sketches, I had played around with cursive-y forms of “Hive” as well, so I ended up creating a logotype that played off that lightheartedness and welcoming energy, but maintains the professional and streamlined look of a sans serif. I replaced the dot above the “i” with a hexagon to tie in the logo.
