0

Trabug Branding

We are extremely happy with the way Trabug’s logo shaped up. The word “TRABUG” is a combination of 2 words “Travel” + “Bug”. We were lucky to get a dot com domain for Trabug. To be honest, sometimes, the availability of a certain dot com domain may influence branding decisions. Even though we had other names shortlisted and we liked them more than “Trabug”, having a brand with a dot com URL, would be beneficial for us in the long run. We didn’t want the brand name to be very long and also to be difficult to pronounce. Since we were targeting mostly English speaking foreigners, we felt this name would be most suitable. This had about 0.1% chance of being mispronounced or misspelled. A good and easy recall is very important for the brand. Anyways, when we shared the name with the team, everyone was very happy. To our surprise, one of our designers did not think of it as a BUG (insect), but for her BUG was equivalent to a DEVICE. We had never thought of it. For one of my UI developers, BUG meant an ERROR. Again, something we had not thought of. But for him it also meant that we were fixing “Errors in Smooth Travel”. So, eventually it all made sense and we decided to go ahead with the design of it. I shall share some early sketches of the logo with you in a bit. We were sure about a few things from the very beginning: We definitely wanted to use the location pin as the base of the logo. We wanted to use tentacles to make it look like a bug We wanted have max 2 colors in the logo, but we did experiment with a 3rd color as well We wanted to use colors which would be vibrant and stand out. I personally love the yellow and black combination. When we were thinking about the logo, we wanted to have something which would look great in outdoor branding. We got the yellow and black from standard signage colors. You can notice signages from a distance. We also wanted the text to be Sans Serif, to keep it fun and informal. This is what we eventually came up with: Let me share with you what each element symbolises and why did we choose this over others. The head of the Bug. In our design exploration this actually came at the end. The logo was looking good but not complete without the head. You shall notice this when you see older versions. The tentacles make the Location Pin look like a bug. I specially like these tentacles because they also remind me of the famous 3D animation character Shrek. Look closely, bug’s tentacles look like Shrek’s ears. We modified to suit our logo. The shape of the “Bug” was debated for quite sometime. But being a boss has some advantages ;). I personally liked this shape of location pin as opposed to some we sketched in our earlier explorations. This particular shape gave a cool and elegant feel to the logo. The “Location Pin” represents, the location of sites, things to do etc., the heart of our concept, quite evidently. The dots represent the diverse set of information and services we have. The font for the logo was quite a struggle, we wanted to have a different Sans Serif font that did not look too casual. Found this one after days of searching. Here are some early explorations of the logo and then what we eventually put together.