Vainu Logo Design

One of my early and most interesting projects as a freelance designer was to design the Vainu logo. The Finnish company Vainu had created a web crawler application that required a logo. The company was in its infancy when I was initially contacted by them and they gave me the following information as a starting point to work to:

About the product

The application is a web crawler that finds sales leads from various data points and is aimed for sales people.
The application makes a complex process very simple and usable for all salespeople.
It runs in all platforms.

Logo Requirements

Comforting, natural colours.
Flat design - This application will be implemented with the latest technologies.
Vainu is Finnish and means 'when a dog gets a scent'.

So with this brief explanation and requirements in mind my first thought was to research general IT companies to get an overall feel for the industry I was designing for. I came across a lot of logos that embraced the digital style design which I didn’t think would work as the logo had to be seen as not being overly associated with information technology as I believed that this would over complicate things and potentially put off potential clients that were not IT savvy.

Focussing on incorporating the translation of Vainu of the ‘when a dog gets a scent’ I researched images of dogs, in particular their noses and sketched out ways to combine the ‘V’ for Vainu and a dogs nose. Ultimately I used the natural way I sketch a dogs face along with a loose shape of a V letterform with a simple curved lines to form a mouth underneath. After eliminating most of the dogs face in my sketch so i was just left with the nose and mouth I began playing about with the sizing of these features to find a balance so they work together to form a solid, simple and effective icon.

Using a soft blue not only adhered to the clients brief of a comforting and natural colour but using a pale and calming tone takes the edge off the very hectic nature of sales to make the application as user friendly as possible. Using a rounded typeface to compliment the logo further promoted this.

Final Vainu Logo with variations

The final logo ticks all the boxes required in the given brief and the company has now grown over the pass few years with offices in Amsterdam, Helsinki, Stockholm, New York, and Oslo. They have a sales intelligence platform which identifies the most valuable sales prospects to a business from a database of over 108 million plus companies. Their mission is ‘to collect, read and understand all the information ever written about every company in the world, and then make this available for everyone’ which has since won them several awards. It was a pleasure but most of all fun to work on this logo and play a part in their growth and identity.

If you require their services please visit their website www.vainu.oi

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