Worked with Meraki Marketing, Product, Engineering, and other various teams
Adobe Illustrator,
After Effects,
Bodymovin/Lottie
Sketch
Branding,
Visual Design
Meraki Go is Cisco Meraki's networking hardware product line targeted at small businesses under 50 employees, with a specific focus on businesses under 20 employees. These companies usually only have one site location and do not have dedicated IT staff to run and maintain their network. Some examples are small offices, independent retailers, or local hospitality businesses.
This new product line from Meraki was to be separate from standard Meraki and would be run on a mobile app instead of the usual dashboard. I worked with one other designer on the initial sketches and directions for the launch of this new product line. I completed the final logo concept design and direction. The work shown only includes the portion of work I did. Many others worked tirelessly on the launch of this new product.
When this project started, the main prompt that was given was that the name was “Go.” To start, we searched for existing examples that had brands within a larger brand (e.g. Diet Coke owned by Coca-Cola). We also looked at how Cisco handled the branding of companies that they acquired. One example we wanted to avoid was the treatment of “Cisco Umbrella” and how they repeat Cisco in the logo. Additionally, we established that since the target audience was mostly to be small businesses with no IT experience, our direction would be less corporate compared to standard Cisco Meraki.
Ideation began with notebook sketches. The goal was to produce fast, rough concepts and produce many variations of the word "GO".
Afterwards, we moved over to digital sketches for more precise forms and faster iterations.
We had a few major rounds of feedback review. It began between the two of us designers and moved on to the rest of the design team. Eventually the narrowed-down concepts were presented to the main Meraki Go team, then to the SVP of Meraki, and finally to a focus group of Meraki employees across different teams.
When we were at the point of showing our concepts outside of our design team, we narrowed it down to four directions to present. This is one of the other concepts that I worked on that was in the final four. One of the weakness of this concept was the single-color version of the logo losing character. The single-color version was significant – it would be used on all the box packaging due to the printing cost limitations that were established.
When I revisited this "infinity" concept for revisions, I focused on a few things. First, was how to represent the variations of the G and its terminal and crossbar/spur. Second, was the thickness of the shape. I reduced the original thickness that I started with. The second variation was too thin and did not hold up when I scaled down the form. I brought the thickness back to a middle-ground between the two.
Third, was whether or not to have a dot in the "O" shape. And fourth, I adjusted where the "O" tail ends. The original has it ending at the very bottom of the circle (-90 degrees). My final adjustment ended up with it ending at 30 degrees more clockwise. This was actually opposite of how the "G" ended up as. I also tried the "G" with a 30 degrees adjustment and variations of the two letters together: G (90°) O (-90°), G (60°) O (-90°), G (60°) O (-120°), etc. The final variation of G (90°) O (-120°) made the form read best as the word "GO" and less of an infinity symbol.
Proxima Soft gives a softer feel than Cisco Meraki's brand font, Proxima Nova. It's a parallel to Meraki Go's goal of being more friendly, less corporate, and targeted at small businesses.
The mix of green, blue, purple is a more flexible departure from Cisco Meraki's standard PMS 68U green, but also remains related to Meraki's and Cisco's brand colors.
The "GO" shape references an infinity symbol and represents connectivity and continuity, while the circle elements provide motion and dynamics.
These are a few examples of how the brand is applied in
different ways.
