All too often, the shoemaker's children go shoeless. In the design and marketing industry, this means that many creative agencies tend to sound like law firms, bearing the name of old founders or shareholders you'll probably never meet, a la Sterling Cooper of Mad Men fame. While we were certainly determined to avoid this boring fate, we had little choice in the matter; Bieda & Bieda would certainly never be remembered or spelled correctly, which would have firmly placed our online position somewhere in Google's already flooded basement.
As renegade designers, operating as scabs outside the constructs of our industry, we first crafted an identity based on the story of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and delivered it to mortal man. We were inspired by this early Robin Hood, hoping to connect the Greek parable with our desire to make our valuable services available to a wider audience, including the businesses that need them most. But we know that the first idea is never the best. The concept was rigid, verging on pretentious, and was not at all representative of who we are or how easy we are to work with.
When we landed on "chemistry," we found a concept that allowed us to define our knack for mixing traditional and new media elements to achieve quantifiable marketplace results, along with our underlying need to always push the envelope, or "experiment," with our design sensibilities. Rather than trying to stamp a clear mark of technology onto the name (i.e. the early favorite, "Digital Chemicals"), we decided it was more important to project an upward progress as a result of using our work, which led us to also seek out terms and imagery that clearly spelled out "motion." A feverish game of mental Bananagrams quickly revealed that the prefix "chem" with the suffix "motion" added up to much more than the sum of its parts: the word "commotion," a word that so artfully implies our rebellious intentions.
The logo had to be line-based and iconic to fit into a world where shiny, chubby Web 2.0 birds are the norm, and we wanted something quirky as well as memorable and easily replicable. We designed a two-color rendering of a test tube rocket ship, firing on all thrusters while soaring for some hypothetical skyline (or profit margin). It fulfills our main criteria while functioning as a powerful, playful symbol of positive direction.
We chose a thin font that fit the ship's illustrative style, with letters of invariable height so that the two-part name can be read as one word. The wordmark and icon were then combined to create the full logo: the company name acting as a launchpad for our now airborne visual mascot.
