Parabola gives non-coders the building blocks they need to create complex data flows in a drag and drop interface. Our logo was designed to reflect that: take a bunch of basic shapes and combine them in an intelligent way to create something greater than the sum of the individual pieces.

I’ve always loved the concept, but the first version of the logo looked just a little too complex, and became unreadable at smaller sizes. Because of these issues, we decided to refine it.

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Removing the excess overlap

The main problem with the original logo, particularly at smaller sizes, was that there were just too many color transitions created by the overlapping shapes. The B was the worst of them all with 7 different regions. We decided on a goal of keeping each character to a maximum of three regions.

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An additional benefit of limiting ourselves to three regions per character was going to be getting rid of the two extra colors required for the B. These two extra blues did not exist anywhere else in our app, so we wanted to get rid of them entirely (we were also updating our color palette at the same time, which is why the blues are different).

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We were able to clean up the P, R, and B and refine their shapes to only use a maximum of three regions and two unique colors. We also tweaked the L to line up with the other letters.

Some final tweaks

We widened the As to make them less spiky, and made the spacing between all characters equal, except for the P & A. The shape of those characters required kerning, so we shrunk the padding to zero between them.

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The Result

We’re super excited with how it turned out! Widening the As and adding more space between characters resulted in a slightly wider logo, but so far it’s worked great with our UI. Check out the final result below.

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Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in learning more about Parabola, check out our website here.

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