Let's design a logo for Tauchain and Agoras

Did you see this post? The Tauchain/Agoras project is looking for new logos. So, let's do it:

Research

What is Tauchain? What are Agoras tokens? Sure, we know what a blockchain is and we also know the difference between coins and tokens. But that's not enough. If we want to design a logo, we first have to understand what distinguishes Tauchain and Agoras from other projects. So, we have to do some research. This means reading blogs, watching videos...

...We should also take a look at the “About τ -Chain”-paper:

Abstract. τ-chain (pronounced tau-chain) is a decentralized peer-to-peer
network having three unified faces: Rules, Proofs, and Computer Programs,
allowing a generalization of virtually any centralized or decentralized P2P network,
together with many new abilities, as we present on this note.

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Let's take a look at the old logos

Now that we know the background of the project, let's examine the old logos. We don't want to copy them, but we also shouldn't ignore them. The Tauchain logo is a blue circle with the Greek letter tau (τ) in it. Underneath we read “Tauchain” in capital letters. It's a clean, sans-serif typeface. The combination of icon and wordmark is sometimes referred to as logo lockup. The Agoras logo looks similar, but it is orange and uses the Greek letter alpha (α).

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What aspects of the logo do we want to transfer to our new logo?

We want to keep the letters tau and alpha, but instead of just using the glyphs from a certain font, we want to create them from scratch, maybe with a twist.
The colors work quite well – they seem to have been chosen wisely – but maybe we want to change them just a little bit.
We definitley want to create lockups like the old ones, additionaly a horizontal arrangement and a version without the wordmark, which can be used for favicons etc.

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What else do we have to consider?

The logos should be distinguishable. There are quite a few cryptocurrencies and we don't want to confuse them. So, the logos shouldn't look like any preexisting logos.
Also, they should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. It has to be, because it will be seen in very low resolutions like 16 by 16 pixels. We want to show that the logos belong together. We should use similar shapes, colors etc.
The logos will be used on dark and light backgrounds, we should avoid using pure black or pure white.

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Let's start with Agoras

How can we represent a token? Maybe like this:

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Awesome! But this token looks lonely. We're no penny-pinchers, so, let's add another one:

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Perfect, now we have a stack. Actually, it looks like a Venn diagram. Maybe that's the way to go. The Greek agora was a gathering place. So, let's make our two tokens interact with each other, resulting in a chain:

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Looking at this, we can vaguely recognize something that we wanted to incorporate in the first place – the letter alpha. We should emphasise it:

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Now we're almost done. But we should use some color. That will make the logo more distinguishable and less boring. For the alpha we will use a vigorous orange. The complementary blue color works great for the background:
Great! We did the first logo.

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Let's get to the Tauchain logo

We want to show that the logos belong together. So, let's start with our old friend, the circle:

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Obviously we cannot just repeat the steps for the agoras logo, so, lets alter the circle:

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Awesome! It looks like an icon we could use to say "globe" or "internet", maybe even "chain". But we want to say tau-chain. So, were is our tau? Let's go search it:

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Ah, there it is. Perfect. Now we need some color. Let's use the colors we used for agoras, but this time we will use the blue for the tau and the orange for the background:
Ta-dah! This is our second logo. But we're not done yet.

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Our logos need wordmarks

Before we can choose a font, we have to answer some questions:

Serif or Sans?

Sans serif fonts work better for displays. Also, they look more modern. We definitely want to choose a “sans”.

Free or licensed?

A free font would be great, because it could also be used for infographics etc. without having to deal with licenses. We will have to be careful, because many free fonts lack important features, for example the Greek alphabet.

Upper or lower case?

TAUCHAIN! or tauchain? The upper case version looks like it's screaming at us. The lower case version looks friendlier, it's more readable and it also looks very modern und understated. Facebook, amazon and ebay don't care about upper case, neither should we.

Tauchain, Tau-chain or τ-Chain? ταυchain!

We want to emphasise the tau, but neither the hyphen nor the greek letter are visually pleasing. However, we could use the Greek alphabet for the “tau” and the Latin alphabet for the “chain”. That's much more subtle than the other solutions.

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Let's find a font

Now we know what we're looking for. But where can we find it? Let's use Google Fonts. We can set some filters: Sans Serif, Greek, 6+ styles. So, what do we got here?

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“Ubuntu” looks great. We should take a closer look:

Ubuntu is a font family designed by Dalton Maag. It consists of 13 fonts: Light, Medium, Regular and Bold – each with an Italic version –, Condensed (only Regular) and Monospaced (Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic). It comes with the letters of the Greek alphabet. That makes it the perfect candidate for our logos.

#curiousfacts

The Greek Font Society is a Non-Profit Organization with the express aim to research the history of Greek typography and the design of historic and contemporary Greek typefaces, which shall bridge the gap between metal and digital technology.

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Let's combine our logos and the wordmarks. The bold font will work best for the lockup. For the Tauchain logo, we will use the blue color of the tau:

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Awesome! And for the Agoras logo, let's use the orange color:

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Testing

Great! The logos look good like this, but that doesn't mean that they'll work in other contexts. So let's go to the laboratory, we'll have to put them to the acid test. First of all, let's see how they look like on different backgrounds:

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We can still recognize them. But how about small resolutions, say 16 by 16 pixels like on coinmarketcap.com? Let's scale our logo down:
Yes, that works. We can try some other things, like blurring, desaturating and rotating the logos. It's important that we can still recognize our logos after torturing them like that. Now that we know that our logos work, we can create some more versions.
We need gray-scale and black&white versions of our logos:

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We also want horizontal logo lockups:

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We also need the logos without the wordmarks:

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Great! We can always open our Illustrator file and create additional versions, should we need them. But I think that's enough for now.

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We're done. Thank you for going through this with me. :)