Extensis — Behind the Logo

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve got a fresh new look. Our recent rebrand has incorporated a new color palette, font, and more — but one of the most important components is our new logo. It’s a refreshed take on our company name, accompanied by an abstract icon — but there’s more to it than meets the eye.

We decided that we needed a rebrand when we acquired our long-time sister company LizardTech — they provided geospatial imagery compression and management software. We wanted this new technology to be reflected in our brand, but we quickly realized that the rebrand needed to be bigger than that.

We worked with Studio Science to reimagine the Extensis brand logo. Brian Pennington, Director of Brand Design at Studio Science let us know a little about their process.

“Every brand project at Studio Science goes through a phase we call the Brand Expression Architecture. At its core, it’s a framework that allows us to understand who a company is and how they relate to external and internal audiences.”

Studio Science had to identify a common thread that brought together our various solutions and highlighted the value that they provide as a combined identity — not an easy task for twelve products that touch on a wide range of professional needs.

The icon

The geometric icon is a two-dimensional representation of layered information. It symbolizes the multiple, compressed layers of metadata that make our clients’ assets more searchable and usable. Metadata are all the little details of a digital asset that give it context. For example, a brand asset may contain design date, file details, licensing information for the fonts used, and more.

One reason that digital assets can be hard to keep track of is that metadata can be applied in so many different ways. Because we all have different approaches to assets, we all save and search for them differently. Our solutions empower users to find assets via multiple different routes, and we wanted to celebrate that with our logo.

The three squares also pay homage to three pillars of our business coming together — fonts, geospatial imagery, and digital assets. These might sound very different, but they have more in common than you might think. We serve our wide variety of customers by making these assets more searchable and usable — empowering improved workflows and uninterrupted creativity.

Studio Science drew inspirations from the original informative imagery — maps.  “During our initial concept development, we agreed on the idea of a map... a proven system of organizing information and bring structure and order to what would otherwise be an indecipherable web of locations. Maps help you get to where you’re going more efficiently. In the same way, Extensis brings structure and order to a team’s growing collection of assets. And that structure helps creative teams be more efficient—and ultimately better—because they’re not spending time looking for the right file.”

The lettering
At Extensis, we know fonts — but even we were a little bit overwhelmed by the wide array of options available for our rebrand. Then, we were reacquainted with Paralucent by the inimitable Rian Hughes, and we fell in love with typography all over again.

Paralucent draws inspiration from industrial, utilitarian sans-serif fonts that value clarity, and then turns that model on its head with playful, charismatic details. Perfectly integrated with the rest of the streamlined typeface — the lowercase g’s seem almost animated, the r’s almost eager, the f’s look like they’re stretching, and square dots add a techno-modern touch of whimsy.

We have over twenty-five years of providing solutions and value to our customers, but we’re not all business. Our commitment to customer success is the direct result of the personal relationships we’ve built with our customers — from designers to DAM experts. That’s why we got so excited about Paralucent; it’s polished, but personable, and simply a beautiful font.

To learn more about type designer Rian Hughes, check out this interview from MyFonts.