When we sat down to create the Tandemly mark, the first question we asked ourselves was, “What is our mission?” We setup a sprint to clarify our goals, dreams, and aspirations for what we wanted Tandemly to be. At the end of our sprint, our message was clear, we wanted to make the web better, and how we would do that was working together with outside teams to help guide them to a more functional, exciting realization of their aspirations.

Now the hard part… How do we express the symbiotic relationship that Tandemly brings to the table? How do we show our intelligence and cleverness at the same time? How do we do all this in a quick to understand recognizable and unique mark?

This is when we stepped back to ask ourselves some fundamental questions on visuals:

Did we want a wordmark alone?

Did we want to pull the mark from the name?

Did we want to build something more contrasting?

We landed on wanting a mark and a text that could work both together and independently, much as how everyone in the Tandemly team and their clients operate. Excellent developers and designers on their own, but magic makers together.

The first phase of experimentation began. Starting with flushing through how the word “tandem.ly” would be presented, we all knew we wanted something that felt organic, but how far should we take that?

We played with everything from brackets in the text to double lines on every letter. We bounced ideas back and forth, never happy with good enough. We finally honed down to a wordmark inspired by a marker on a dry erase board; it had the cleaness for readability and the rough organic feel to represent our flexibility.

Phase two, the mark itself… the BIG challenge. We discussed ideas ranging from bicycles to birds. All felt cliché and boring. So much experimentation and sketching commenced. From a million versions of simple shapes to another million forms of initials. We collaborated and discussed and tore our ideas apart. And then sketched again, to then return to dissection… the lesson is, “sketch, sketch, dissect, sketch, dissect some more, sketch some more… rinse repeat.”

As brutal of a process as it is, it flushes out a lot of the bad ideas while elevating the good ones to become great, not to mention a great bonding experience for the team. After another sketchbook of ampersands and the letter “t” a merger of the mark formulated.

Now that we had the shape of logo solidified, the time for adding emotion presented itself. We knew from the beginning that we wanted to evoke cooperation. While researching and exploring other companies and products that inspired us, we found ourselves connecting with warm passionate hues that not only draw the eye, but also generates a friendly connection in the subconscious. From the sunniest yellow to the blaziest red, we scoured the color spectrum for the right tone of Tandemly.

Honed in and solidified, it was time to bring the Tandemly logo to life in business cards, the website, and all the fun marketing materials. We found that pairing the logo with a fun flow of color that reinforces Tandemly’s mission of of diversity and inclusion. As you can never have great UX until every one is represented and acknowledged.