Give your app a name and symbol.
Once we knew what application we were going to develop we started to contemplate what the brand would look and feel like. Our experience has taught us that the sooner you can have a name and an identity in place the better. Once in place there’s an instant “realness” that begins to occur regardless of how far along you are with your idea. You begin to refer to the application by its name and overall it gives the team something to rally around. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that everything stop until you have your application professionally branded. It could be something as simple as the working name of the app and a symbol on a napkin, just give it something that you can begin to build emotion around.
The original name for Ember was Fireside (more in the next post), it communicated what we wanted and it was clever because of its common link with the word “chat”. As far as a symbol we knew we wanted it to mesh with the idea of a campfire for obvious reasons. We began to sketch out a few ideas…
Another thing we considered right away was the position of the app. Would it stand on its own or belong to a portfolio of applications? We knew there were a few other ideas in the hopper so we decided to establish an overarching “style” for our applications. We wanted it to stand out among the 1000’s of applications in the AppStore. We focused around a home-made aesthetic since the store is currently crowded with glossy lick-able icons.
We immediately started to focus on the work of Peter Callesen. Callesen has a home-made aspect to his work, but executes it in a very clever and modern way. We wanted to bring this same appeal to our application portfolio. We sketched out a few more ideas along these lines and within a very short while we had the working version of our identity for Ember.
