This autumn (2019), I joined the process of making Truffle AI’s brand identity come to life. It’s been a really interesting process that I want to share with you in this article, but first: what is Truffle AI?

Truffle AI is a chatbot service to help small business owners recruit talents for their open position. You can easily access the service with either URL or QR code. The idea behind Truffle AI is that it’s expensive and a quality product, but affordable and accessible for everyone. Truffle AI aims to contribute to the user’s life and business.

Starting out with the inspiration for Truffle AI’s logo was very clear from the start: a truffle. Its shape is rounded (a circle) to indicate the shape of a truffle. However, its not organic silhouette resembling an actual truffle. This is because it has been polished into a perfect circle, hence the quality aspect of it. Pattern inside the logo is inspired by the inside and the outside of an actual truffle. It’s also a pattern looking like the pieces are all coming together creating this rounded circle. The pieces are connecting like the way it connects its users together. With this, we have a expensive, yet friendly and organic logo.

Research — I talked with the team about the background and identity of Truffle AI. We put together keywords, to understand what Truffle AI is for the users. Created a moodboard, which inspired me to use the pattern of a truffle in the design.

Story — The challenge for me was to focus more on the story than sketching and drawing. Forcing me to focus on the actual story of the logo.

Prototype — Sketching by hand, brainstorming and exploring shapes. Then digitalised some of the ideas into Adobe Illustrator.

Starting out with the brainstorming process, I already had the idea of a circled logo design. However, trying to break that first though, I moved into something else. As you can see under the text on the sketches to the right, I focused heavily on the initials of Truffle AI: TAI. Focused on simplifying it as much as possible and bend the rules of the letters. The idea was that if the viewer looked closely enough, they would have a moment of “oh, it’s the initials of Truffle AI”.

However, going through that, I realised that the identity of Truffle AI lied more in the first sketches I did. The new idea with using the initials, made the design look more like a tech company. The logo of Truffle AI needed something more closer to the original source, something handmade and quality like a truffle.

While researching other recruiting companies, it was very clear that blue is very popular within this field.

Within colour psychology, blue is seen to represent harmony, trust, security, loyalty, technology etc. I also read that in Japan (correct me if I’m wrong) is seen as a lucky colour and university students/ office workers wear suits in different shades of blue.

However, Truffle AI is different, we want our system to stand out. Yellow/orange is more energetic, welcoming and warm compared to blue.

Black and grey tones are seen as expensive and professional looking. It’s solid and time-less to use. Additional to that, adding a dash of colour that will “pop” out on the screen, is a nice answer to “less is more”. With this colour that “pop” we want the human and friendly side of Truffle AI to show through. Yellow is associated with happiness, intellect and energy. It’s also a warm and welcoming colour. White and red is added to show the hex code that matches the rest of the palette. White for a fresh minimalistic background. Red for buttons or errors that needs to be highlighted in a warning colour.

After researching and finalising the colour palette, the next obvious step was to test the new identity colours on the logo.

The finishing colours on the logo, is a gradient of the red and the yellow in the colour palette. Creating a nice orange colour, like a sunset. It’s a warm and welcoming colour for Truffle AI’s users.

Here are the take aways from the process that I designed our new logo.

1. My final logo design was mostly inspired by my first sketches. I tried many different forms and sketches, but I still ended up with my first ideas. I learned from this that I need to make the “bad” designs to see what was the right design.

2. I’m very quick to pick up my pen and make sketches. During this process, I learned to value the story behind the design. Focus on getting the story behind my design out. So I put my pen down, to write instead.

3. I learned to ask myself “why?” when designing. Yusuke Takahashi PhD would question my design when I showed them to him, he wanted to know why I made the design like I did and what was my story behind it. As a painter and drawer, this is not something I’m used to asking myself: I rely on my own feelings, and if it looks aesthetically good enough. As a designer, you need to think of the user/viewer who’s receiving your design. How will they react? What kind of feeling do they get from your design?