Scope
Logo
Style Guide
App Icon
Illustration
The Paradigm team approached me very early on for help with a brand identity. They are a tech startup of recent grads (mostly from Virginia Tech) that wanted to focus on creating innovative solutions in the university setting. Their very first product is an app designed to simplify on campus parking.
In order to help set them up with an identity that would work for them as they developed their company beyond the initial product I wanted to make sure theParadigm brand was not based on parking, but represented their desire to innovate, assess problems, and come up with simple and feasible solutions.
As a young company in the tech arena the Paradigm team wanted a logo that felt “techy”and gave a sense of reliability to their company. This involved not straying too far from industry norms, but at the same time as a company focused on innovation, they wanted to have a logo that displayed that without feeling like every other tech brand. As I developed logo concepts, they quickly gravitated towards an abstract eye I had designed, because it has a very clear conceptual connection to identifying problems and seeing solutions. This eye/lens mark became the starting point of the logo suite and got refined further as I developed a logotype pairing.
Because Paradigm’s primary mark felt very clean and simple, I wanted to pair it with a typeface that would help the brand identity stand out, something that felt futuristic and exciting. After several different pairings I ended up going with Marvin Visions, a re-invention of the 1969 typeface Marvin by Mathieu Triay. Marvin Visions captures some of the nostalgia towards the future as expressed in comic books and sci-fi novels. This typeface helped to define Paradigm’s aesthetic and set them up for scaling down the road. By using color and text as primary visual elements Paradigm could have an exciting and unique brand that is consistent across channels without relying on professional photography or a massive illustration library.
In order to have text be one of the primary visual pillars of Paradigms brand I needed a color palette that would help to show off Marvin Visions. The Paradigm team wanted to include a light blue, but agreed with me that it shouldn’t be the primary color since that is pretty cliché within the tech industry. In order to differentiate Paradigm I added a bright orange, red, and a dark blue.These bright colors worked well together on both white and dark backgrounds, but could also work as the background color when more visual emphasis was needed on simple layout.
After the identity design I was commissioned to create an icon for their first product – Paradigm Park. After several different tests we ended up going with a very simple location tag that took style queues from Paradigm's logo, adding in the curving interior cutout. I created two slight variations of this, one designed for Android using Material Design, and the other for IOS.
Six months later Paradigm asked me to help them re-design their onboarding screens for Paradigm Park (as well as a few other screens in the app). They wanted to include fun and simple illustrations that helped walk users through the necessary information in a visually appealing way. This involved creating custom illustrations and expanding the color palette a little to provide sufficient options for some of the more complex designs. Along with creating the illustrations I helped to re-design the user interface to make it cleaner and more engaging.