Journey of the Square Root Brand
We began as Oceanus.
When I joined Square Root in 2013, the company was named Oceanus. We were a small team (~10-15) and the CEO had an interest in undergoing a rebrand. At the time, he was on the fence about a name change, but myself (as the designer and someone who had agency experience) and the marketing team pushed for a name that better represented the company and its vision.
I knew I wanted our brand to feel smart. We loved technology. We were nerds. We were humble and approachable. We were all unique. Our clients loved to visit our offices, and over the years our culture won numerous awards.
Square Root was born.
Initially I had two drivers when created the logo. (1) We wanted people to know we were the type of people who always thought outside the box. (2) We wanted people to know that we could drive their business forward. FORWARD was a big thing for a young startup.
I noticed something when you look at a box and literally tilt your head as if you are looking outside of it. Interesting shapes start to appear, and if you color those shapes a certain way, you get a clear arrow of moving forward. The tail was added to actually make the logo look more like a question mark (another part of our motto was we were always curious and questioning), but it was also a nod to the word “root”.
I started out creating our brand imagery that matched the tone we were going for.
Before we were sold, I ended with creating a process to build our brand imagery to be 100% unique to individuals we were building it for.
Here I used photographs of our team members to create unique cities. We tiled these cities together to create landscapes whenever we talked about stores or locations.
I generated value posters using audio data from the team member(s) that won that specific value award reading the value itself. Since everyone has a different voice, I was guaranteed a personalized poster for that specific team member.
Taking the concept further, one year our CEO read everyone a personalized greeting and thanks for the holidays. We used that audio to generate posters/holiday cards. The tone of the image met our brand, but we also delivered something that could never be recreated by hand.
Iterating on the idea of using audio data to build unique graphics, I began to expand on earlier ideas I had with the brand using “kaleidoscopes”, only this time they were way more complex and unique to individuals.
Imagery generated using these processes were then used as backdrops in marketing and social materials, slide presentations, website, etc.
Screenshots of Square-Root.com
An example of a brochure using some of our brand elements.