Commerce Components

Brief: Create a logomark for Shopify's new Commerce Components product. The logo should feel at home alongside Shopify's other logos, and oh, we need it ASAP.

Role: Graphic design concept, and execution. Partnered with other designers Jordan Ouellette, Jon Rundle, and José Torre to explore, unify, and polish concepts.

For the first sketches, I explored shapes and concepts that were metaphorically aligned with the concept of a component — breaking something down into constituent parts. Things like layers, lines, blocks, lego, bricks, puzzles, all brought together with Shopify's familiar S. It was a very fun challenge, and what you see below are some of the best of the over a hundred sketches.

Bringing together the sketches, Jon, Jordan and I met up to go through the concepts that we felt best. Jon did an amazing job simplifying and digitizing the concepts from my sketches as well as bringing his own ideas. Jon, Jordan and I worked on the top two concepts, but I felt it could still be simpler, and right before sending to stakeholders, I put together the concept in the bottom left. In the meantime José was working on the concept in the bottom right — which beautifully brings together the concept of components assembling together.

We presented our concepts to stakeholders and the Round 1 explorations you see in the bottom were the clear winner.

The next task was — can we combine these concepts? We set out so solve for that, but also try another round to see if there were any other concepts we could consider. Enter Round 2.

After trying new directions, and refinements, we felt the best solution was the one which combined the two strongest concepts, so we set out to simplify them further. You can see the unifying concepts below.

After reviewing with stakeholders, we realized that although graphically clever and interesting to combine these into a single solution, it made the visual design much more busy, and the underlying concepts sort of got mixed? Are components the blocks? Are they the layers? We ultimately decided to go back once more...

The final design went back to the simpler layering concept I originally designed, with many tweaks and refinements by Jon. Seeing this logo alongside all of Shopify's other sub-brands, it's clear to see the simplified version is the right solution, and I'm glad we ultimately landed there.

This was a whirlwind project that took place over a few days, and it was exciting, and exhilarating to have so much happen in such a short period of time. It blew me away how much can be accomplished in so little time when working alongside talented designers, collaborating closely, and with a tight feedback loop with stakeholders. What a blast!