Kaisho.org - Icons + Logos

Lymba Corporation - Logo: Date: Fall 2006; Lymba is a software company in the Dallas area that specializes in natural language processing (NLP). In short, they develop question-answering systems that can take input from the user in natural English and return an intelligent answer to the question. While I initially came on board to create their website, I ended up helping out with their logo and identity as well.

Lymba was wonderful to work with because they are just starting out as their own company (though they are an offshoot of an older and more estalished business) and they were truly a blank slate from an identity perspective. This logo invokes the image of the universal symbol for power, which is then in turn incorporated with their wordmark, "The Power to Answer."

UTD Galaxy - Logo: Date: Spring 2006; Galaxy is the intranet portal for faculty, students, and staff at The University of Texas at Dallas. My design is actually a skin for the underlying software, the Sungard SCT Luminis Platform.

Galaxy was a joy to work on because I got to design the identity of the brand from the ground up. It was imperative that we establish the new intranet as fresh and contemporary, to get away from negative associations with the previous intranet system. We also knew that a strong brand would help speed along adoption of the system.

We wanted it to include the school colors of orange and green while still being simple enough to translate well to black-and-white and grayscale. The result is shown here and has printed nicely in everything from the school newspaper to high-res color pamphlets, on both a white and dark background.

UTD Galaxy - Icons: Date: Spring 2006; Designing icons for Galaxy was another interesting challenge because it required taking both a design perspective and an interface perspective of the project. I felt the general design of the intranet portal should not contain a lot of distracting colors, because the focus is really on the content. To a degree, the design needed to be transparent so that it wouldn't be obtrusive to the users' daily work.

However, I felt that the icons provided the perfect outlet to splash a little color into the page. There are only an average of four icons on the page, so I could afford to make them eye-catching with bright colors and bold outlines. The glossiness makes them stand out from the dark background (check out the page design to see them in context), and simple shapes make them legible even at a small size.

UTD CareerWorks - Logo: Date: Winter 2005; While working on the redesign of the UTD Career Center website, I discovered that the main draw of their website - a job and resume searching system called CareerWorks - was suffering from a lack of visibility and appeal. The clients wanted all students to sign up for this system, so my solution was to give it its own mini-identity.

This luminescent, glossy button is featured prominently on every page of the site, inviting the user to click on it and enter the system. Shown at right are a few color and font variations that we investigated (they eventually went with green). The button also glows faintly when moused over, to further reinforce its clickability.

This new logo ended up being one of the most popular features of the redesign.

Anne Katherine Halsall