Founded in 2011, GoSpotCheck has grown from a small, 4-person startup to a 30+ employee company.
The business went from TechStars to a basement, to a garage on the back half of another business, to Galvanize, and now to our own headquarters in downtown Denver. We’ve exceeded goals, grown our customer list, streamlined processes, and improved our products.
But despite these various strides, one important aspect of the business remained unchanged: our logo. The original GoSpotCheck logo (pictured directly below) was designed when the company had a crowd-sourced business model. The orange “bubble” icon represented both crowd feedback/input and a location pin. The “people” within the bubble represented crowd users themselves.
The Original Logo
In late 2012, the logo was updated with a fresher color palette and a skeuomorphic bubble. We also began using the white/orange logo on a black background as our primary logo.
Issues
There were 3 primary, though not detrimental, issues with this logo:
- The company name, GoSpotCheck, is spelled exactly as spelled here; the “G”, “S”, and “C” are capitalized, and the name is 1 single word. Based on the logo(s) above, people often times misread the name as “GO|SPOTCHECK”, “Go Spotcheck”, “Go Spot Check”, etc.
- Once the business moved away from a crowd-sourced model in mid 2013, the icon/bubble no longer represented the business itself
- The icon itself with the white people on the orange background, quickly became illegible in many applications, specifically at small sizes common in tech (favicons, old device app icons, etc)
"Refresh" vs. "New"
In 2014, we could no longer avoid the issues listed above. The logo felt less and less representative of us as a business, a brand, a culture, or even simply a group of people. Our company swag used the full logo rarely, if ever. New employees were unsure what the logo was or how it represented us. It was time for a change.
Though we’d talked about doing a new logo for quite some time, there were some important considerations that tended to hold us back:
- Our name, “GoSpotCheck”, needed to stay untouched (Heads Up: did you know that “Spot-check” is a real word? It means “to check (something) quickly for problems especially by looking at a few things”)
- Orange and Black needed to remain as the primary brand colors
- There were legitimate concerns that a completely new logo would be too confusing for our customers and audience
And so, we decided to do a logo “refresh”; we’d retain positive aspects of the established logo, but fix the issues listed above.
The New Logo
The new logo is inspired by the company itself: dynamic, bold, quick and concise. We retained the idea of using our icon within the logotype, but it works just as well on its own. The icon still loosely represents feedback (with the quote bubble tail), but the people have been replaced with a sharp checkmark; it is literally a check within a spot.
The new logo also addresses all previous concerns:
- Illegible: The logo now reads exactly as the name should be spelled, GoSpotCheck
- Outdated Symbolism: The icon no longer references a crowd-sourced business model
- Scaling: The logo, and specifically the icon, now scale down to small sizes far more legibly
Check it out here:
