Business Logos Are Boring

As logos go, Business Logos are usually the most unimaginative. Although we have gotten away from the dreaded millennial swoosh, most company logos these days tend to fall into one of two categories:

Business Name in Boring Font, or	Freely Interpreted Image

Our Old Logo Was Both

Before we even started our company, we knew that we needed a catchy name and a cool logo to go with it. The only problem is, just looking at our old logo makes us cringe. Really? This violates basic design principles and more than a few copyright issues, too.

Obviously, something had to change.

So we sat down with a lot of good ideas (and a lot of bad ones), and set ourselves some rules:

At first, none of our ideas fit these constraints. They were always too complicated, too common, or too confusing. It wasn't until we really examined ourselves that we had an "Aha!" moment.

THE NAME

First, we asked ourselves, "What is CatanFusion all about?" Well, we offer products and services that help people get more enjoyment out of their games of Catan. In particular, our rulesets and Seasons event cards make it possible to combine and play all of the previously-incompatible Catan expansions together. So we thought, "What's a great word for 'putting things together in a synergistic way'?"

Why, Fusion, of course!

Thus, CatanFusion was born.

THE ATOM

Then came the thorny issue of the logo itself. There are certain images that come to mind when the word "Fusion" is used: Atoms and Nuclei and Energy. We started looking at simple drawings of atomic particles, and that's when we had a brainwave: there are three "orbits" in a typical atom drawing! Guess how many people are needed to play a game of Catan together? You guessed it-THREE! But it gets better. The three atomic orbits have six end-points. Guess what is the maximum number of players in a typical Catan game? SIX!

The Atom was here to stay.

THE HEX

When we drew those six oval rings, they formed a familiar shape in the middle. In case you might have forgotten, the basic building blocks of Catan are tiles that take the shape of hexagons. Those tiles that form the board of Catan are six-sided, and the center of our atom-logo certainly looked like it had six sides! With a little bit of almost-unnoticeable cleanup, we had a hex!

The Hex had arrived.

THE CUBE

Besides hexes, Catan is famous for one other thing--Dice. The simple act of tossing those two dice creates an unbelievable amount of emotion: anguish, surprise, and joy. We knew that our logo wouldn't truly be complete without some reference to the random chance that has made Catan famous. We were looking at images of dice (yes, we were bored) when we noticed an M.C. Escher-esque drawing of endless cubes that appeared to be stacked on top of each other. All that was required to draw the scene was a hexagon and three straight lines.

The Cube made its entrance.

THE COLOR

In the beginning, our logo was just black and white. Which is fine, but it looked boring and was hard to remember. We experimented with a number of different background colors as we tried to figure out which one was best. It finally came down to two colors, both of them related to nuclear/atomic situations. There was alien green (RGB: 153, 204, 0)(Hex: #99CC00), and then there was safety orange (RGB: 255, 153, 0)(Hex: #FF9900). Both of them had their pros and cons, but we tried to think about what color would catch people's attention best. The yellow/orange naturally attracted our eyes, because it looked like a construction sign. So it stuck.

The Color appeared.

Introducing Our New Logo

As a result, we came up with the following logo, which we think is much better than our previous one:

Do you agree? Tell us how you like our logo by reaching out to us at our email address below!

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