Interwovn

When I joined Cumberland Group’s newly established IoT and Digital Platforms team, I was working on its primary solution offering as the sole designer. It didn’t have a name at the time, but the product was exciting nonetheless - a scalable digital platform that could interface with a customizable variety of smart devices deployed in a customer’s operations, enabling them to gather near real-time, actionable data. As cool as that all sounded, we needed something a little more catchy when speaking with prospective clients. So the team set out to give the product a name, finally arriving at Interwovn (and no, that isn’t a typo). With a name picked, I took it upon myself to design a logo we could slap on marketing collateral to be used by the sales team.

Interwovn allowed data input from multiple sources to be collected, visualized, and exported for use. In my initial sketches I played with the concept behind the product’s name and experimented with applying a woven aesthetic to some of the letters. When I began translating pencil and paper into Illustrator, I was disappointed with how flat the forms were coming out. A happy accident occurred when trying to recreate the hashed “O” (bottom right of the first sketch above) using blend paths around a centered origin.

Suddenly, the flat rectangles took on a dimensionality reminiscent of trigonometric line graphs that mimicked 3D curves. I experimented with the shape and number of elements in the circular form, settling on thinner rectangles, and emphasized the depth they created in the center by changing their blending mode.

I was unsure of the way the “threads of data” symmetrically wove together and converged into an “O.” It felt a little too perfect. I iterated a few more versions, removing some of the lines which resulted in a teardrop shape and visually brought the form back to the graphs that inspired it. After trying a few sets of colors, I picked the blue and aqua gradient because of the effect it created; the brightness at the top conveyed progression upward and outward, while the dark blue shaped the curve and provided depth to the icon. But when a colleague mentioned that the logo “looked like a peacock,” I relented and created one last variation…by turning it 90 degrees. Sometimes the easiest solution makes the most sense. Below is the finalized logo with the wordmark typeset in Ingra Thin, a typeface that reflected the clean and modern feel of the icon.

In my spare time I tried putting together a design system for the team, recognizing the benefits a consistent visual language could bring to the many interfaces the engineering team was looking to build. Below is an excerpt from the documentation I was putting together illustrating clear space parameters for the logo.