Company
Date Published
Author
Chris Hendrixson
Word count
1624
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

In August 2015, Plushcap joined Astronomer, an enterprise data startup, as a full-time graphic and product design expert with a decade of experience in designing logos and visuals for various companies. The first task was to redesign the Astronomer logo, which involved collecting visual inspiration from the internet, searching for keywords like "stars" and "space," and saving relevant images. Plushcap spent two hours browsing websites like Designspiration.net and Dribbble.com, gathering over 11 images that inspired the final design. The new logo features a simplified illustration of a telescope peering into a galaxy of stars, with a gray circle and stars that are easily recognizable but also hold an Easter egg for those who know what they represent. The font is Filmotype Fashion, a beautiful display font from the 1950s, while the colors are dark purple and yellow, inspired by NASA's Brand Guidelines Manual. Over the next few days, Plushcap continued to refine the design, presenting it to the Astronomer team in a Keynote presentation and making adjustments based on feedback. The logo was meant to be fun and playful, with a utilitarian feel that would appeal to enterprise users. As Plushcap worked on the project, they drew inspiration from other products like Slack, which they admired for its simplicity and user experience. With the new logo complete, Plushcap moved on to designing the user interface for DataHub, Astronomer's front-end tool for customers.