We've got 99 problems, but a logo ain't one
“The strongest logos tell simple stories.”
Ever since we came up with the idea of 42courses, we’ve never really been very happy with our logo, until now.
Logos are such strange beasts, they are often one of the first things people see, and so they help set a brand’s tone. The best ones, I believe, are simple (you can draw it yourself in under 10 seconds), memorable, and in today’s world, they have to work in very small places (e.g. favicon or app icons).
To give you some context, our name came about because all the other domains we wanted to buy were already taken. So one day, whilst sipping on a drink at a bar called Caprice in Cape Town, with some friends, someone said: “What about a URL that starts with a number?” Shortly after that, the idea of using the number 42 came about.
Why 42? Well its famous, thanks to Douglas Adams and his famous book, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, for being the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”. A fitting name for a knowledge company. And so 42courses.com was born.
Coming up with a logo and design was next. We ended up settling on a ninja theme (as you do), mainly because we wanted to use the tag line, “Learn enough to be dangerous.” (We still love that line, but lots of non-English speakers seemed to wonder if we were teaching people to make bombs, so we had to retire that… but that’s another story).
So, this is the first logo we came up with:
The good thing was that it was fun and it worked in most places, and given the COVID pandemic I now see we were well ahead of the mask-wearing curve too!
The bad thing is that it was complicated, looked perhaps a bit too left-field for a knowledge company, plus it didn’t work very well at a small size, and had no relevance to the name, ‘42’.
A couple of years later, we had another go and re-designed the website while we were at it. This time around we swapped the theme from Ninjas, to space.
The space theme is something we still love. When many people think of space, it conjures up ideas of exploration and discovery (thank you Star Trek and NASA) and it has that fun nod to the father of ‘42’, Douglas Adams.
Next came the logo shown below. It was a bit of a ‘that will do’ job, at the time. We must have tried hundreds of versions, but eventually settled on it because we liked the owl, as it’s associated with knowledge. But it still didn’t really fit. It’s not a simple logo, it gets lost in small places, and it has nothing to do with space or 42 for that matter.
Then along comes 2020 in all its glory.
We decided to use this year to come up with a big site revamp, improving the design of the site, reducing points of friction for learners and much much more (will share more of this in the coming weeks).
One of the features we loved, was this new animated home screen illustration. It conveys the discovery element of space nicely, and there are some subtle hints that point to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy in there too (and a cat too because, internet 🐈 ).
We really like the shape of the space blob, so much so that we decided to make that our logo, and then we put the 42 in too.
Now we have something that’s simple, related to space, and some people say it looks a bit like an apple, and thanks to Sir Isaac Newton, apples are forever associated with “aha” moments, so that works for us.
We also designed it to be an animated logo (see below), because we believe logos will be living more and more on screens rather than static pages, so why make them flat when you can animate them!
Below is a sneak peek of what it will look like both animated and static.
As with any branding, this is all still just a small part of a constant evolution. We have so many lovely new design features coming up and almost all of them are based directly off feedback from our learners; the people who keep 42courses alive, and inspire us every day with support, kind words and often incredible answers to questions in our courses, so thank you.
We’ll keep you updated in the coming weeks/months, but hope this has been interesting and that wherever you are in the world, you’ll stay safe and hopefully happy. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know. We love to hear from you, and as you can probably tell, I’m happy to chat design and branding any day, all day. :)
