A week ago, we had unveiled our new brand identity.
Our humble ‘product’ had become a ‘product suite’ and soon outgrew our company branding too, which resulted in a lot of confusion for everyone – for both ourselves and our customers.
We had different logos for different products and this soon got out of hand and was painfully difficult to maintain. It was not always clear when a new product logo was needed and which logo to use in which scenario.
Today, we would like to share with you the backstory of how we came up with our new logos and what were on our minds throughout this journey.
For the curious, let’s take a quick walk down memory lane.
The earliest version of the VersaFleet logo (circa 2014) was heavily inspired by SalesForce, with the stylised ‘ƒ‘. It represented our desire to become the equivalent of SalesForce for the logistics industry. Our Founder was fond of the idea of ‘the cloud’ and wanted to remind our customers that we were cloud software and specifically Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), something which was rare and unheard of in the market in 2012. Hence, the cloud motif and blue sky hues. Also he’s a big fan of Marc Benioff’s work pioneering SaaS.
We then decided to change the logo as it was too similar to SalesForce. We abandoned the cloud and focused on the serif-logotype as our main logo. We still kept the stylised ‘ƒ‘ as our customers had gotten used to the serif-logotype and it symbolised the product’s versatility, where it is both structured and flexible at the same time.
We loved our old logotype, a lot! But alas, it was not versatile enough to publish on various platforms like on social media, because the logo was too long and needed way too much width. Even if we were to force it to fit, the logo becomes too small to read.
Growing with our logo
With our previous logo, it was pretty challenging for our Product team. The previous logo – though memorable – was confusing as there were multiple versions of the same logo. A different ‘sub’ logo for each product. And to make things even worse, the ‘sub’ logos would look almost identical to the ‘main’ logo. This was confusing.
Our customers could not tell the difference between the ‘sub’ logos of the newer products and we struggled to explain to customers that these products were not standalone products. They were still a part of, not apart from, the ‘main’ VersaFleet product.
For every new major product feature, we were not sure whether we should be adding yet another new name with its own logo or to not name it at all.
When we thought about ‘fixing’ the logo, we realised we couldn’t just jump right into it and correct it ASAP. Our logo meant a lot to our customers and it was how we identified ourselves for a very long time. We had to first understand how our current product suite was perceived and how to re-organise our product suite. This meant we had to painstakingly redesign our products’ names to re-align them while maintaining the same level of brand awareness. So that’s what we did.
After many, many discovery sessions and remote workshops (yes, fully remote, pats on our backs – phew!), to re-discover what our brand and product meant, we concluded by deciding to bring all our products under a single ‘VersaFleet’ product umbrella.
Introducing our brand new icon
While conducting our workshops, we discovered that our brand had come to mean 3 key ideas:
- Visibility: Delivery milestones can be tracked at all stages of a delivery, by everyone, at any time
- Digitalisation & Advancement: VersaFleet represented the latest in last mile technologies and was a significant departure from planning ‘by hand’ with spreadsheets, pen & paper, or even on whiteboards with pins & strings!
- Routing & Optimisation: Many customers come looking for VersaFleet to optimise routes & schedules to improve their transport productivity
To convey all these meanings in our logo, we realised that a wordmark alone would no longer suffice. To represent what our brand has come to mean, we decided to introduce a new icon to our logo.
Incorporating these 3 key ideas into our icon, we used 3 symbols to represent each of these characteristics:
Here are some of the icon iterations we went through while trying to incorporate the 3 symbols together:
In a typical day, we spend a lot of time understanding logistics planning behaviours, patterns & idiosyncrasies. So, we were inspired to use modular algorithms and scales themselves to construct our final iteration of our icon!
We are a tech company & we unabashedly love our algorithms. So we couldn’t help but incorporate the acclaimed ‘golden ratio’ into the base construction of our icon, especially in the outer circle.
The inner circle uses a different ratio to soften the overall structure, which expresses VersaFleet’s personality of a balanced approach of both professional sophistication and openness. The sharp edges of the logo symbolizes stability and precision whereas the rounded edges ease the construction’s rigidity, demonstrating flexibility.
The additional white space between the shapes increases contrast and clarity to highlight our strong spirit of collaboration. You might notice that the logo contains two shapes that overlap with each other. This gives depth to the logo while depicting a fluid, continuous flow of movement. The gradation of lighter shades at the edges to the darker shades inwards adds volume and dimension (think ‘Mobius Strip’). This further emphasises VersaFleet’s desire for continuity and fluidity. It was also our own little flair to the icon.
Refreshing our wordmark
Looking at our new logo wordmark, we decided to simplify the design – changing fonts from serif to sans-serif. We wanted to emphasize clarity, modernity, & sophistication, which are sensibilities often associated with sans-serif fonts. As a tech company, we genuinely hope that we can help our customers digitalise to be future ready!
One thing that’s also noticeable is that the new wordmark is all-blue! Using 2 colours made it seem like VersaFleet was 2 words. By using 1 colour, we wish to emphasise that “VersaFleet” is one word, unified with inner harmony.
The new wordmark is a hybrid of Museo 500 and Enzo OT Medium fonts. We used the basic and geometrical Museo as a base and added the distinctive character of Enzo, which is the slightly slanted letters to the wordmark.
The semi-bold font is to ensure maximum readability and to accentuate the uniqueness of the shape. We very carefully choose the right ‘weight’ for the wordmark so that it complements the thickness of the new icon. Meanwhile, the slightly cheeky curved and sharp corners share similarities with the logo icon, which exhibits similiar characteristics.
One thing we decided to do was to ditch the recognisable stylised ‘ƒ‘ found in our old logo, because this wordmark is now no longer our only logo. We have a new icon that has come to represent what VersaFleet’s brand has come to mean and to keep the stylised ‘ƒ‘ would detract and draw away focus. In the coming months, you will see more of the icon and less of the wordmark as we transition to using the icon as our main logo.
Putting it together: Our new logo
“Digitalisation is a perpetual journey that begins with a first step. VersaFleet is honoured to be that first step of choice for all businesses.”
Shamir Rahim, CEO and Founder of VersaFleet™
We shed a lot of blood, sweat and tears coming up with our new logo. It’s not easy to part ways with our 6-year-old logo. We had long internal debates, on going from a ‘corporate look’ to simple, yet flexible and modern shapes. In the end, we came up with our minimalistic yet meaningful new logo that embodies all of VersaFleet’s personality, mission, and messages.
Through this rebranding exercise, we aspire to present a future of where everyone has better visibility and control over their supply chain operations. We hope that we can humbly continue to be a catalyst to help every company jumpstart their digitalisation journey.
Starting today, there will be exciting changes in this new direction: on our website, in our social media posts, and in some aspects of our product itself. Don’t worry, none of these changes are meant to be obtrusive or disruptive. It may be slightly distracting at first but it’s still us! We are still VersaFleet. Just clearer, more consistent and, we hope, more instantly recognizable with our fresh new look.
Goodbye old logo! Thank you for serving us well for the past 6 years of our journey.
