Objectives and Kick-off

Knowing it’s a big challenge to create a symbol with these objectives our game plan was to work on a new symbol and at the same time keep the original Nabla as a fallback (reconstruct it better on condition something new wasn’t qualified enough). The created objectives served as a very efficient filtering mechanism allowing us to rapidly debunk stuff and keep moving on.

Objectives

1. The logo, symbol and wordmark need to be distinctive, memorable and clear.

2. The symbol needs to be universal and hold its own place alongside other currency symbols as well as push cryptocurrencies standards.

3. The construction needs to be simple enough for easy reproduction. (benchmark: drawn on paper by anyone in a few seconds).

4. Endure any amount of friction thrown at it.*

*While we will do everything to support a correct use, there will nevertheless be cases of user variation making this a critical point.

5. Interchangable with the currency code DCR.

6. Adaptable to a number of contexts: standing alone, together with wordmark, next to a number, etc.

7. Carry over some of the visual and semantic weight of the original.

The more we worked on the new symbol approaches, the more we saw the weaknesses of the old and how it was holding us back in the long run.

Previous Nabla symbol and other triangles

Triangles do make visually strong symbols but also lack in dynamics. For that reason a lot of symbols based on triangles look confusingly similiar.

After some research we found dozens of bigger and smaller brands in a number of sectors using symbols with very similar characteristics to Decred’s Nabla. To make matters worse, several other cryptocurrencies were already using triangles likewise. The truly worst associations found in regards to the motif in hand were the triangular pedophile group symbols.

Another problem besides the lack of distinctiveness was that when scaled down, Nabla simplifies to a downwards arrow. This might have become a huge passive issue in the long run since Decred’s symbol will primarily be in a trading context. There you have candlestick charts pointing up or down. Who on earth would want to see their assets having a negative direction?

The downward direction is an issue i’ve noticed with several financial logos — quite recently with Nordea rebranding. I think if you’re dealing with financial stuff having any negative or downward trend hiding in your symbol is pretty much as bad as having subliminal dickbutt somewhere in there.

Symbol Process

Since we had a limited amount of time to work on the symbol the conceptual work was overall done in 3 to 4 day sprints. With each run we explored new directions and stress tested the ones that passed the inital fire trials.