New Branding for Plain

I had the pleasure of working with Plain on a brand refresh in preparation for their series A announcement. Plain is a powerful support platform built for modern technical support teams, and it needed a new logo to reflect their growth.

Keywords for the new logo were polished, fast, durable, and timeless. During the sketching phase we realised we needed to spend a lot more time than expected to find the right direction. Often you need to try out a lot of things to first eliminate all the directions that don't work. After digitising a few concepts from 114 sketched logos we went back to the drawing board to come up with 60 more sketches.

The thing about persising when things don't go as fast as you'd hope is that simply by generating a lot of ideas you exponentially incease your chance of finding something that works. During our discussions the client mentioned the concept of how Plain builds bridges between support teams and customers. I went to work and created a handful of sketched concepts, from which they liked a few. Later in the process we went back to it and as I was digitising it I realised that by rotating the logo 90º it looked like an abstract P. The team loved it and suddenly we were moving fast because when you know, you know.

We spent some time finding the right typeface (a slightly tweaked version of Rothek), the colors, and all the variations of the logo. Check out this post by the co-founder and CEO of Plain for more insights and their take on the whole process.