In 2015 I found myself in a career limbo. I had just left my role at P2BInvestor as a co-founder and CTO. I decided to take a 6 month sabbatical and work on my own ideas and products. I was working with my friends on freelance projects here and there, and running a successful blog. I needed a legal entity to track the income under, so when it was time to set it up, I paused and reflected on the brand. I spent a lot of time on introspection:

What would distinguish me from my thousands of peers?

What words described my “jack of all trades” approach to technology?

How can I make my quirky personality come through in the brand?

I drew upon my education in design and branding. Starting with a keyword list and outlining my demographic, I knew I needed to hit a few key points:

Work with clients that “get me”

Something that’s fun and playful

Gender neutral, I don’t want to be a “programming bro”

A name not easily forgotten

A legacy that transcends beyond me

The answer was in front of me for a long time before I embraced it. At the time the word “unicorn” wasn’t as popular in tech. There was a ruby gem with the name, but many searches for the brand with other keywords seemed to reveal that I had stumbled upon something both unique and uniting. Unicorn. Fucking ‘ell this was it. Forget the haters, this is ME. I’m effeminate but straight. I’m talented and unique. I’m all the colors of the rainbow and I’m not ashamed of it.

Unicorn Logo v1

Building a Brand

I worked with Josh Gary to design our logo and business cards. The results were amazing. This brand was perfect for what I wanted at the time: to be bold and colorful. Rainbows were flying everywhere. I thought to myself: this is a logo that will never age, will expand into whatever role I wanted it to be, and is clearly perfection. What I didn’t realize at the time was that a brand must evolve if the business evolves. More on that later.

Josh did an amazing job designing my business cards. With a letter pressed logo on triplexed heavy stock. These cards are were so sexy and thick!

Adapting the brand to the business

This logo worked well for a couple years as a personal brand. It was my legal entity as a consultant, and I felt the brand was really just an extension of self. However, the name Unicorn really began to take shape when I started working with Cesar and Adam. The three of us had been working on a SaaS product (aka the “blog”), SwiftCast.TV, together for almost two years. The name SwiftCast was constrained to Swift, and we wanted to teach a variety of other subjects. We took the name Unicorn and adapted the brand to suite the rename of SwiftCast.TV to Unicorn.TV!