I recently had the pleasure of designing the brand and identity for ecosyste.ms and promised myself I’d keep track as we went so that I could write a blog post about. Here’s me fulfilling that promise to myself…

What is ecosyste.ms?

ecosyste.ms is a new venture founded by Open Source Collective, aiming to transform the open source funding landscape. It encourages companies who rely on Open Source Software (OSS) as part of their business to see OSS funding as a strategic investment, rather than a marketing exercise, by highlighting the precariousness of dependency on OSS, and offering a solution: securing software infrastructure through financial support while reforming OSS funding to be fairer and more equitable.

But that’s not easy - determining which projects need support the most, and how to distribute the limited finances available is complex. Part of ecosyste.ms mission, as well as awareness and behaviour change, is making that part simple.

The brief

I was asked to create an exciting and engaging brand for this new project that communicated the interdependency and fragility of the state of Open Source Software ecosystems. It should appeal primarily to Open Source Program Offices in big tech companies, developers who evangelise for OSS in their organisations, and OSS contributors, in that order.

Additionally, while the project is an Open Source Collective project - built on the payment tech and data from Open Collective, it needed to avoid strong associations, due to a potential conflict of interest that they were keen to avoid; Open Collective is funding provider itself, but it was very important that people were aware that ecosyste.ms supports many competing platforms, and can only achieve it’s bold ambitions with an agnostic approach to payment providers, giving the widest possible coverage.

Context

As with any design project, I started with research and discovery, speaking to stakeholders, users, and then desk research: looking at the sector, competitors, and reading to get a feel for the space. I found the insights from looking at context interesting, and they turned out to be really important for this project.

If you had to draw a map of wider software ecosystem The Open Source Funding space overlaps with a few other spaces, particularly:

Open Source Software in general
Philanthropy and tech-leaning charities
Financial technology a.k.a fintech
Crypto and other digital currencies

Each space comes with its own challenges and preconceptions, I won’t go into detail here but just to say not everyone in our target audience would be thrilled if we associated (deliberately or accidentally) the brand with some of the players in those sectors. I decided to stay away from certain iconography or visuals - coins, chains, cryptography, money, just to be safe.

Understanding context is vital when designing a brand; you need to be aware of the conventions, iconography and semiotics of the wider ecosystem that your brand will exist in. A contextual analysis like this sits alongside a competitor analysis, the goal being to understand the wider associations your audience may draw based on their experience, and avoid (or capitalise) on those associations with your design decisions.

Concepting

I’m a literal person and find the most appealing brands have a strong associative metaphor, so when I design a brand that’s where I start; find a strong metaphor and work outwards. One of the references we talked about in our first discovery call was this XKCD comic - illustrating the reality of open source, especially where billion dollar businesses operate under such precariousness.

xkcd comic about dependency, showing a complex diagram of infrastructure, evoking balancing stones, with everything dependent on a single project so random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003 — https://xkcd.com/2347/ Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 2.5 License.

The comic evokes balancing stones (also called rock balancing or stone stacking); the practice of stacking rocks in stable but often precarious arrangements, either as art, meditation, or just for fun. Importantly, it’s done without using adhesives or supports, relying solely on the careful placement and balance of the rocks, creating the feeling of fragility and interdependency we want to evoke. With hindsight it’s an obvious association but it’s not where we started. Before we landed here, we explored several metaphors:

Plant life in a terrarium: Visually attractive, but ultimately the wrong metaphor—while they appear fragile, terrariums are self-sustaining, which doesn’t capture the need for ongoing support.
Plants in a bell jar: Closer, as it suggested fragility and the need for protection, but still missed the interconnectedness of OSS.
Mycelium (the network of fungus under a forest floor): A fascinating metaphor for interconnection, but visually tricky and already heavily used in other sectors - I see you, online psychedelic vendors.

I’m skipping over this a bit for brevity, but we got quite far with a few of these concepts, even quite liking a few before evaluating their effectiveness and choosing another direction.

We got quite far with this one, but it wasn’t the one

One thing I’ve seen time and again is how much uncertainty pervades during a branding exercise, and how taste, execution and communication can be in conflict. Throwing out a logo you’re proud of because it doesn’t quite hit the brief never feels easy, but it’s always necessary.

Settling on a direction

Balancing stones, from reference to logo

Through concepting and trying out a few directions we settled on balancing stones as the metaphor. I created a few visuals based on reference images until we found a composition that stood out, and paired with some colour this felt like a promising direction.

A logo needs to be recognisable at any size and in nearly any colour, so throughout the design process you need to test: how does the logo look in a single colour at various sizes? Does it hold up or does the recognition begin to break down?

Unfortunately, we found that although this design looked strong when large and in colour, it lost all recognition at small sizes in a single colour, looking more like a squiggle than balancing stones, and losing a lot of uniqueness, so another approach was needed.

I went back to the concept and reference photos of stacked stones on the internet. I looked for ones with strong silhouettes, and realised that the more basic the shape, the stronger the silhouette, so decided to move in the direction of simple geometric shapes.

So I developed a second concept, with a more precarious stack of stones based on simpler shapes. Along with this I changed the approach to colours, from a gradient to less abstract colours, attempting to echo the natural theme and critically to set the brand apart from others in the sector, where single colour wordmarks and abstract or technological feeling shapes appear often.

It was at this point I added some simple shadows to the stones, which really helped to sell the concept, giving depth and weight to each stone.

Refining the brand

Happy enough with the direction it was time to focus on the typography, we had already settled on Inter Extra Bold as the typeface. I knew I wanted a typeface that would fit well with the simple geometry of the shapes, and serendipitously this was a subtle reference back to Open Source Collective, whose branding typeface is Inter. For brevity, I’m skipping through a lot details here because typesetting a logo is probably worth a blog post of its own, but choosing a typeface is hard, and anything you can do to narrow your options down is helpful. But it’s not set-and-forget, there’s plenty of massaging and tweaking to do to make sure the typeface behaves and looks as good as possible.

At this point I added a visual device to ground the stones, and really sell the idea of balancing stones. The addition of the green line was made to help explain the metaphor: we’re on the ground, the stones are balancing precariously on top of each other, they can fall at any moment.

It was around here we started to test the silhouette again and we realised at smaller sizes it looked a bit like beloved cartoon character Bart Simpson. This happens way more often that you’d imagine, the human mind is incredibly good at drawing connections.

I had noticed that there was something human about the silhouette, and didn’t mind, in fact maybe there’s a benefit to it, but such a strong bart-silhouette wasn’t what we were going for, so back to the sketching I went, finding a less ambiguous shape for the torso middle stone, and a more dramatic angle to remove a bit of the chin of the head top stone.

Colour and final iterations

It was around this point you can see the final logo taking shape. We had a strong metaphor, a recognisable (and not ambiguous) silhouette and a concept that leant itself well to single colour, varied sizes and uses.

Another test I like to do when designing a logo is to place it amongst it’s competitors, fairly often your logo will be dropped in a grid or positioned near to others, and it’s important it holds up. When we did this we saw the the colours, while natural, understated and pleasing weren’t working - they lacked volume and against more colourful logos looked faded, as if the logo had been left in the sun too long.

Rather than going back to the drawing board, this was a small tweak - bringing in a bit of contrast and making the colours look a bit ‘hotter’, bringing the whole thing together. This was a step away from the natural approach to colours I’d started with, but on balance the vibrancy really helps distinguish the logo, and reusing the colours later in user interface design, where they really pop, has cemented that decision.

logo_final_v2_final_really final_use_this_one.ai

And there you see it, the final brand and logo.

(there’s no such thing as) The final product

The reception to the logo from the client and stakeholders was really positive, and it’s been well received by users too. Since designing the logo we’ve adjusted and extended the brand in a few ways - and that’s expected, a brand should extend and change and grow through its use. We’ve played with the stones - almost making them their own characters, using them to illustrate the service at various points. We’ve added further shadows to give them more physical presence in the world, and I even started 3d modelling them, so maybe one day they’ll move, or even exist in the real world as soft toys.

This sounds like a cliche but it’s true: designing a brand isn’t a four week process, it’s the beginning of a journey and the start of a stewardship, designing the first representation and putting in place the context and boundaries for those who come afterwards to be creative, bold and able to do the unexpected.

If this project has piqued your interest, I’ve written a case study on the whole thing on my site, but I’d also encourage you to go take a look at it for real too.

Designing the ecosyste.ms brand