Description

Designing Instahome’s logo

Category

Branding

Year

2020

The essence of logo design is how your messages can be expressed thoughtfully and succinctly through simple lines and shapes.

Designing the first logo is always tricky. Unlike renewing an existing logo, there aren’t any references I can adapt from. Starting from a blank canvas can be either motivating or intimidating. To me, it is often the latter, just as I often find the first paragraph of an essay the hardest.

Thankfully, the idea behind Instahome is simple. It is a new business with the mission to digitise the home renting journey and allow anyone to rent easily through an end-to-end designed experience. So the key elements and messages of the logo were relatively straightforward: to invoke the familiar picture of a home, overlaid with a veneer of technology and modernity.

To begin, I sketched a few logos around the theme of home and looked for ideas and messages that could be spun out of lines and shapes. No genius is needed to start from the universal icon for a home – a polygon with a pointy top.

“How else would you have started?”

The best part about the ideation process is letting my ideas run wild and only narrowing down once my creativity has been exhausted. It is a simple process of addition and subtraction. Now that I’ve got the most straightforward shape of a home, how could I add to it? I turned it 3D.

“And I see something there…”
“Yes, like a moving box opening up?”
“Add to it. Solid shade.”
“Subtract. Make it simpler.“
“Subtract more. Outline.”
“Took out too much. Let’s add to it one last time.”
“Let’s tidy it up and give it some color.”
“Too flat.”
“Ta-da!”

And there we go, Instahome’s first logo! Firstly, it is the shape of a home resembling a box that is opening up, invoking the most satisfying stage of the renting process – the time where you can finally settle in and unpack your belongings into your new home.

Secondly, the flat look with sharp edges and corners gives it a modern look that fits well with Instahome’s mission to use technology to simplify and speed up the process of renting a home.

Finally, I chose a colour gradient that transitions from orange to red, like the colour of sunrise across the horizon on a cool morning. Conveying a sense of energy, warmth and youthfulness, like what Instahome wishes to bring to renters in Malaysia.

Name cards designed to be eye-catching, with the holder’s preferred name underlined