The story behind our new logo

Ever since Adam joined me to work on Hackster, which is to say exactly a year ago, we’ve been talking about updating the logo. Indeed, the one you’ve come to know in the past couple years is cool, but it doesn’t convey much of a personality. Like many of you might have guessed it’s just the name typed in a pretty font I found.

To me, a logo is more than just a cool image that relates to your brand. It’s a mark that defines your personality as a company, and more importantly, it’s a meaning-bearing symbol that unites your team, your community, your clients and all your stakeholders. That’s why I think it’s one of those things that you can’t just settle on because it’s easy. It has to be right.

In the process, we’ve gone through thousands of images on Dribbble for inspiration, we’ve hired two designers, launched one contest on 99designs and had one poll with our close community. All in all we’ve seen hundreds of variations (the 99designs contest itself yielded 202 variations). I can’t exactly count how many hours we spent on it. A lot.

Every time one of us found something they liked and showed it to the rest of the team, we’d start hearing “I don’t like this, it’d be better if it was like that”. The more people we added to the team, the more feedback we received, and the more complicated it got. There hasn’t been a single option that we agreed on.

I think the reason for that is that our team perfectly represents the maker movement. As in, it’s difficult to clearly define it, because everyone within it is so different. If you restrict it to hardware*, you’ll find electronic engineers, web developers, teachers, students, artists, kids, seniors, beginners, master hackers, and everybody in between. It is an extremely diverse community and that’s what makes its beauty and power: we complete each other with our ideas and skills. As a collective mind, we know about everything there is to know. Together, we can achieve anything we put our minds to.

What unites us, I think, is the desire to improve the world around us. The straight refusal of status quo. The idea that, yes, we can. If our circuits burst into flames, if our code refuses to work, or whatever wall we hit, we don’t let ourselves be discouraged and just push on. Until. It. Works. There’s a little bit of a fighter in all of us, but also this notion that we always get another chance.

For those of you who have played Street Fighter, you might recognize Ryu and Ken’s powerful air punch:

That’s what I think of when I think of a fighter. These two badass dudes that fight villains with their bare hands and knowledge of karate. Makers are not that different. They use their hands and knowledge, and when you look at what they achieve, you can certainly call them badass.

Another one of my favorite childhood characters is Super Mario. He kills nasty mushrooms and turtles by jumping on them, and when he gets hit he dies. You get the ability to try again thanks to one-up mushrooms, which you acquire by air-punching boxes. It looks like this (this box is invisible until hit):

One-ups mean you don’t have to succeed the first time. If you get hit, just try again. Without this kind of mentality we’d be too crippled by fear to do anything.

Which brings me back to our logo. Like I said, we went through a lot of iterations. Eventually, this is the one that stuck:

It’s an H, air-punching convention and fatality in the face. It’s reaching upwards for more, and it’s traversed by an electric passion. That motion, to me, represents the spirit behind the maker movement, the true essence of a hacker. The idea that we use our hands and knowledge for good. That we’re fighters that are not afraid of failing. That we’re badass. And that we’re all geeks at heart.

We come together as a community to share our knowledge and passion, because we want to help one another learn and make things. It’s okay if we don’t know something, because someone else can teach us. We’re strong as individuals, and stronger as a community. Together, any problem can be solved, no matter how hard.

So if you feel low energy one day, stare at our logo, and remember what it stands for. It’s in you, you can do it.

* Today, the term “Maker” is used to describe anyone who makes just about anything, from jewelry to websites, paintings or robots.