We hope you like the new look site! We have tried to make it clean and easy to maintain.
At the heart of it are the new intermorphic company and product logos, which people seem to like. They are (we hope) unique and easily recogniseable.
As far as the im product logos go, we needed to come up with a concept and imagery that could have a common feel across the range of products we want to do, and also scale up as well as scale down to icons. Having tried many approaches and hit the usual buffers, I now have renewed respect for all those icon designers out there. How important can one eensy-weensy little pixel be? Quite a lot as it happens when it comes to icon design!
The noatikl, liptikl and optikl designs also lend themselves perfectly to being animated, as they are like little free-swimming fish or even mini-jumbo airplanes (you can see that by imagining the trailing connector circle as a tail fin). When it comes to animations, I hope we are going to be able to look at things like spinning the “tikl” feathers around the trailing connector, like little propellers on a shaft. There is so much fun to be had with these little tikls.
What do they “mean”, and where did the product names come from, I hear you ask? Well, the first name we came up with was liptikl. This is the name for the lyric generator. We liked it because we wanted our lyric generator to be able to deliver unusual, obscure, non-obvious, ambiguous and unexpected results (hopefully good results!). We got to thinking on these kind of qualities, and came up with “elliptical” – it just popped into our heads. Aside from the fact that it met the criteria, one of the cool things about it is that it is also great for word smiths, and imagery, as it sounds like “lip tickle”. We liked this, as it is quirky and visual, and we felt that tickling lips was like a way of stimulating words and utterances, teasing new prose into extistance! When I am thinking of something to say, I sometimes purse my lips. The blue circle on the lips represents an object that is going round the ellipse, like a tongue (blue?) licking lips in a circular motion, or a planet circling the sun.
The imagery for noatikl is meant to symbolise the wave of sound, and the fluidity of music. Also, noatikl is primarily a MIDI note generator, so we though “note tikl” was appropriate (and so the “notes” on the “n” in the logo). This concept moved along similar lines to those for liptikl, in that the product would be tickling notes into existance, and hopefully resulting in cool new ideas.
optikl was just obvious, once we had the other two! I like the quirky eyes, which fit well with it being a light synthesiser.
The intermorphic logo is also interesting. As the rationale for intermorphic is to build tools to help generate ideas, the concept of ideas “popping out” literally popped into our minds. So, we have an ideas factory (“inter”), generating ideas that are shown as circles migrating to the “morphic” cloud. The italicised “i” also makes it look like a moving train, which is pumping ideas out of its funnel (ok, like a old steam train!).
Why did we choose to have tail stems for the im products? Yes, we know that when it comes to branding taxonomy that it is normal practise for the common part of a brand (i.e. a stem) to be first, or to prefix other common words (e.g. Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel etc.). When it comes to generating new ideas it is often handy to look at things from a different perspective. So, with that in mind, we decided to append our product stem, tikl, instead. This also means that our product brands can stand on their own two feet, independent of the main company brand: im noatikl, im liptikl, im optikl etc.
Anyhow, we should now be all set up, to keep things moving forward.
