A company with a name as cool as 'Smart Giraffe' definitely needs a logo full of character! Yet, as a software company it still needed to be contemporary and original but in no way 'cartoony'! It needed to be approachable, engaging, not too formal, not too clinical... but still professional...
As an agency we often come across these seemingly impossible briefs! This one however, was made even harder since we were directly involved with the startup, which was the parent company of a marketing analytics software platform that we were doing the UX and UI design work on.
A Giraffe of some sort had to be in the logo, so we started by searching for Giraffe images that had a character to them, friendly, intellectual, inquisitive... we then looked at how we could represent that in graphical shapes that were more formal - triangles, ovals, ellipses etc - the trick was to not loose the 'character' of the Giraffe in the process but to provide some original styling.
After numerous iterations and some additions of natural curves to give a more approachable visual style, we ended up with the brand graphic you see above. Created in vector format, the logo is infinitely scalable and useful across media. Finally we made a Neck Tie out of the Giraffes patterning - a nod to our old school maths teacher... which we thought was fitting for a research company.
“We love the Smart Giraffe brand design, it totally captures who we are and is so unique and full of character...”