Jobodex is a privacy-focused job search and organizer app designed to help people track opportunities, manage applications, create and manage resumes, and prepare for interviews.
The Challenge
Develop a logo that represents these disparate facets of a job search into a unified, compelling graphic:
- the complexity of a job search
- the multiple elements involved in a job search (e.g. resumes, cover letters, job fairs, interviews, etc.)
- the emotional journey of a job search, and
- the ultimate success of finding a job.
The log must also be easily derived into an app icon and a social media profile avatar.
The Solution
I have always appreciated the mid-century modern aesthetic and style. Its combination of clean lines, quirky futurism, elegant minimalism and use of unique color really resonate with me.
Deciding to lean into the mid-century aesthetic, my primary goal was to create a logo that would easily translate into an app icon that would be unique enough to stand out in a sea of crowded app icons.
Take 1
With that in mind, rather than sketch, I jumped right into Illustrator and created an app icon first. My thinking was that getting that nailed down would make it easier to derive a logo from it.
Here is that icon:
I even adapted it for use as an app icon in early beta releases of the app:
But this wasn’t quite right. I liked the concept of the cards. Those represented different job opportunities and a container to track them. But the color palette was dull and felt dated. And the typography was highly readable but forgettable.
This was not the right logo.
Take Two
While I still really liked the concept of cards representing job opportunities, I thought that creating some sort of symbol to represent the job search journey might be a better option. The symbol needed to be complex enough to illustrate a beginning and an end with some stops and hurdles along the way but simple enough to translate into a small icon.
My first sketch combined circles and a line with the line representing the job search journey and the circles representing milestones along the way.
I liked this concept, but there were too many circles which wouldn’t translate well to a small icon. Plus it looked vaguely like a chart.
This didn’t feel quite right.
Take Three (and the Winner!)
Ultimately I finally combined Take One and Take Two into the right logo. The final logo has a path with a circle at the beginning and the end that sits on a grid of cards.
Each of the cards in the grid is a unique color meant to represent a job, a job opportunities, events, business cards, tasks—every element that comes together to create a job search.
The path begins at the bottom of a block intending to represent the end of something. The path moves downward curving through multiple other blocks until it curves upward finally stopping in a block. The path is the emotional journey through all the elements of a job search ending on an upward trajectory. And the path just happens to be in the shape of the letter “J.”
Final Product
Good logo design suggests that a logo should be no more than three colors. The final Jobodex logo does not follow that design practice, but its primary use cases are digital so it felt acceptable to create a logo with so many colors.
Logo
The final logo:
The lockup with the word mark:
App Icon
The app icon is very subtly different. Because Apple automatically crops the app icon to add the rounded corners a few things needed to happen:
- the rounded corners of the background squares were squared off
- the Jobodex “J” was made slightly smaller and shorter
Social Media Avatar
Fortunately the logo works very well in most social media profiles, but a few present them in a circle. To accommodate that, a social media version of the logo with a smaller Jobodex “J” and shorter ascending part of the “J” was created.
