For us, 2017 was a year packed with work, game event booths, and a massive crowdfunding campaign. As we went along, we realized what Dized has in common with disruptive technologies such as VR and AR: communicating their value is hard until people get to try them. While a hands-on test is usually enough to get people excited, we still have to try our best to make sure all the corollary material supports the central concept, helps explain it and supports its value.
Communicating what Dized is, or does, is a tough nut to crack. What we’re doing is working on a platform that can run many modular tools to teach and enhance board games in a new way. What people see for now is an app featuring (or not featuring) their favorite game, and a chance to skip reading the rulebook.
Part of this process involves building a recognizable brand and making sure the various elements constituting it fit together nicely. Today we want to shed some light on how we reached our current visual identity, and what were the steps that took us there. Taking advantage of the recollecting skills of our Art Director, we went back to the very beginning.
Electric Dreams
The first Dized logo was a rudimentary mash-up of two concepts: “analog games” and “digital” (our Art Director stresses that he had nothing to do with the early designs). The result was somewhat literal, and quite… ahem, electrifying: the side of a die showing two pips, and the screen of a smart device as the opposite side of an imaginary whole. It was a starting point for the conversation about what we were doing, and some aspects of it made it into the current logomark.
The logo was getting the most basic concept across but needed improvement. Lighting bolts aside, if you came across it without the proper context, you’d be hard-pressed to know what the logo was about. It featured a “mobile device”, but matching the screen with the side of the die turned out to be an impossible task: it was either getting too close to a tv set in dimension or not matching/mirroring the die shape. There were also scalability issues: adding pips to make the die concept more obvious didn’t work at all sizes, and the typography needed attention.
In short: the logo had design issues, balance problems, the wordmark couldn’t live by itself, and the smart device felt shortsighted, locking us down to current technology, while we’re in the game for the long haul.
Back to the future
To no one’s surprise, we are all fans of the 80s retro laser/digital grid look. Not as much as the Kung Fury guys, but enough to use it as an element which symbolizes a non-dystopian, fun future as well as a shorthand for digitization. While aware of the popularity gained by the hex shape in recent years, we decided not to reinvent the wheel: it was the go-to logic shape for an isometric cube (the other option being a square).
The new logo manages to convey the same concepts as the old one, looks more professional, is more flexible in placement and scale, and doesn’t tie us to a specific family or generation of devices or platforms.
The website
The website we used during the Indiegogo campaign was always, at least in our mind, a “temp website,” or the bare minimum for an acceptable online presence. A placeholder, but not much more. It worked ok, but it wasn’t informative enough, and in dire need of an upgrade once the campaign closed, as many things had happened and changed during that whirlwind month.
What you can now see on dized.com is the result of addressing some of those issues, or at least there’s now enough information for someone unaware of Dized to understand what we’re trying to do. We also now have a plan on how that space will change with the announcement of new features and content, and as we move progressively towards turning Dized into a “platform” (more on that in a future blog post).
50 shades of Dized
Think of Spotify’s green, or Netflix’s red: what is the color that we want people to associate with Dized immediately?
As a small team, we always have to react and move as quickly as we can. That means that we can’t conduct several months of studies to test our branding palette: we look at what’s out there and make educated guesses on what could work for us.
The first Dized colors were teal, black and neon pink, maybe not the most obvious choices. Then came UK Game Expo, where we had a booth with a “secret lab” vibe. We scrapped the pink and added yellow to our palette, because of the “safety yellow” used in safety stripe tape. After that, it was time to gear up for the Indiegogo campaign. Indiegogo uses a very recognizable shade of pink: it fit our new logo well, feeling more like an evolution rather than a nostalgic callback to the original palette. Teal also shifted more towards blue, for a cleaner feeling. Ultimately we realized that with the huge library of games we plan to host on Dized, we should also use each game’s palette (or something complementary) in the website and app interface. The Tutorial for Blood Rage will use red, leather brown and other “blood rage” colors, not our teal and black.
Over time this might change again, especially when we’ll have dozens and dozens of titles on show. Right now we can have more fun with colors: after all, it’s a hobby product we’re doing.
— -
Want to learn more about Dized? Sign up on this page and make sure you’re the first to discover what’s new — we’re working on a few exciting things! No spam, only good stuff. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
