Branding
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2023-2024
About the Project
How I ended up at DEH
I’ve always been a passionate Discord user, so I joined that server to find out the latest news and experiments (experimental features) about Discord.
The lack of Design & Consistency
Before I started designing for Discord Experiment Hub (DEH in short), the Design was made by a bunch of community members and it lacked consistency and didn’t convey the vision of DEH, simple but yet powerful. So I reached out to the Owner of DEH, Tolgchu. At first I just made the banner and quickly I made more and more and built on top of the key-elements of DEH - the Logo and the similar branding to Discord.
The previous design wasn’t as unique
Since my first work of design at DEH was based on the already established branding, pretty much everything was copied from Discord’s Branding. Since we wanted to not have any copyright issues, especially with the font, as well as more uniqueness compared to other Discord Servers, Tolgchu and I have decided to do a soft rebrand.
We wanted to keep it true to the original
We already had quickly grown to 2.000 Members and people simply don’t like change. So we wanted to keep it similar and maintain the clean and minimal design, we had previously.
Design
How I narrowed down the design decisions for the rebrand
First I’ve taken a look at the original logo designed by IllagerCaptain.
Pretty simple. So why change it? Well…I wanted it to be more friendly, so I rounded some corners and added a fun little wave, to reflect the ongoing and always happening changes with Discord and thus Discord Experiment Hub.
The problem with Tabs V2 and the banner
Tabs V2 is a new UI for Discord Mobile. It also shows the banner of the Server, but a bit different…we used to have a graphic in the bottom right corner, but it would be cut off in Tabs V2 and a lot of our Members uses that new experimental UI. Also a huge issue, was the font. The previous Banner used the Font Discord uses, Ginto Nord. That however is a paid font and could lead to legal issues. So I also searched for a clean and free font, similar to Ginto Nord. After some research, I fell in love with Galanto Grotesque. And because I removed the graphic, it felt a bit empty, so I added a modern gradient, using circles with different lightness values of the main color and blur.
What about the brand color/blurple?
I tried out multiple colors as the main brand color. At first it was purple, then a turqouise-green color. But it just didn’t feel right, and the branding could not really be associated with a Project about Discord. So I and Tolgchu decided to stick with the good ol’ blurple, which made the rebrand pretty small, yet effective.
Earning money with DEH
In September 2023, the DEH Team was able to enable Server Subscriptions inside Discord, to earn money for their volunteer work. Server Subscriptions offer 3 Tiers, with each tier requiring an icon. I thought, I’d keep it simple to the logo but fill up the tube more and more, as the tiers goes up and since I wanted something special for Tier 3, the most expensive tier, I decided to replace the bubbles in the tube with hearts and add that modern gradient, I used in the banner. Also each Tier has it’s own color, that represents the role colors.
Server Icons for Experiment Servers
A unique feature of the DEH Server is, that they provide servers with experiments, that are very hard to get, in order to try them out. Like Clyde AI, Guest Invites and more! Each Server required it’s own Icon of course. We settled down on using the regular server icon but replacing the tube with an icon relevant to the experiment. For now we are using official Discord Icons, but who knows what the future holds.
Role Icons & Emojis
These are mostly by Discord as well, so please just take a look in the Discord, if you wanna see them.
