Logo Redesign for Cybersecurity Start-up

Adlumin is a fast-growing cybersecurity start-up that provides security information and event management, powered by advanced machine learning.

The company wanted to freshen up their logo and branding to reflect their growth and stand out among competitors, while still maintaining brand recognition.

Uncovering the Problem

The logo redesign process began with an exploratory call with Adlumin’s Marketing Director, where we discussed why the current logo needed an update and what the vision was for the new logo and subsequent branding. The current logo had been in place for years, and over time, certain pain points and advantages had developed:

The font was deprecated, making it difficult to incorporate the logo anywhere without an image file, and impossible to generate new high quality assets.
The gradient-heavy brand mark was outdated and an obstacle in generating knockout print materials.

Updated Brand Vision

I collaborated with the marketing team on an updated brand vision that would guide the branding refresh, identifying how the logo would fit into that story.

Moving forward, we needed a clean, flattened brand mark combined with a more modern and popular font. We needed to refresh the brand without losing brand recognition.

There was also an opportunity to tweak and refresh the brand colors, and we wanted to evoke themes of visibility and illumination.

The Current Market Landscape

Previous logo among competitors

I collected the logos of Adlumin’s competitors in the cybersecurity space and assessed current trends to get a feel for how our potential customers would see us while shopping around for the best solution to fit their needs.

Ideation Sketches

I sketching out as many ideas as possible in a sketchbook for about 30 minutes, and added new ideas as they came up.

I opened a file in Sketch and tried some of my ideas with color, iterating new ideas as I went along, and combining different elements. The goal was to generate as many ideas as possible in a short amount of time, emulating a design charette process.

Lastly, I made some font suggestions based on the updated brand vision.

Logo Design

The favored options that came out of ideation were those that still felt like Adlumin but with a new element brought into the mix.

The top two ideas replaced the red circle in the center of the brand mark with an exploding central starburst or spiral shape. This brought energy and movement to the old brand mark.

However, they didn’t read well in some of the smaller forms needed, like favicons or business cards. More importantly, changing the form of the central red circle made the logo stop reading as the familiar Adlumin brand when I shared it with other stakeholders.

Based on the feedback I received, I went back to the drawing board with the six best ideas and iterated on each one. I focused on trying to bring a new element to the forms that surrounded the red circle instead, while keeping that central element in place. Based on the favored responses to the spiral form, I continued to lean into forms with spiral momentum. I also experimented with ways to retain the shape of the blue arcs from the original logo with negative space.

I presented the best four options to C-level and upper management. From that meeting, we narrowed our options to the last two. I was then able to share the top two options with the rest of the Adlumin team, and polled everyone for their favored choice. Lastly, I collaborated marketing to test the top two options in key marketing materials.

New Logo

I finalized different versions of the logo for knockout and greyscale use with horizontal and vertical options. Lastly, I created the definitions for the logo and new brand colors for our brand guidelines and internal documentation.