Trixel Diary | Logo Evolution

Welcome to a brand-new feature: Trixel Diary! In these posts, we'll be going in-depth into the development and evolution of Trixel Creative itself. This feature: the evolution of our logo!

Our logo is a big part of our brand identity. It represents unity within our team that spans across the entire globe, with the starburst representing sparks of creativity that make our world glow.

But, it wasn't a simple process to get where we are now. There were many revisions, colour schemes, and names that we tried out before settling with what we have now.

Let's take a look, shall we?

Trixel At Your Service

The first of these names was 'Trixel Service'. Trixel Service itself was proposed as a desktop program that provided a variety of 'services', including a web browser. What were the other services you ask? Well... we're not entirely sure we knew either. It just sounded cool.

The logo we used at the time is unrecognisable to the logo that we use today. Featuring a purple ident with an outstanding font that was almost definitely generated by cooltext.com.

"Trixel.com" - (Don't click this link!)

After some not-so-wonderful attempts to create a simple web browser back in 2013 with little knowledge (shocker!), we moved into the 20th century with a domain! Introducing: Trixel.com! Remember when companies had '.com' as part of their branding?

Only, we never actually owned that domain without the '.weebly' extension, so why we chose that name remains a mystery. Regardless, here is our logo from that time, for which continued the purple theme:

This logo was also used for the Trixel Studios Steam account, which has remained inactive since 2014.

A screenshot of the Trixel Studios Steam account from 2020

Bursting Onto The Scene

After accepting the fact we didn't own the Trixel.com domain, we removed the '.com' from our branding. With this change came a brand-new logo. This time, adopting a circular shape and a colourful cyan-and-pink burst!

It was clear that, with this logo, we were channeling our 'fun' side - attempting to appear more friendly and colourful. For those familiar with T-Games, this logo may seem a bit familiar!

Fun fact: within the file name, this logo is known as 'Bubble'! It wouldn't be too long until this bubble burst, though.

Trixel Studios

It's safe to say that we thought just 'Trixel' was a little bland, so we opted for something more 'official' sounding. This is when we adopted the suffix 'Studios', referring to the game development aspect that we wanted to expand upon at the time. Little did we know that it would be years before we properly began development on a full game.

Late 2014 is when our logo started to become a little more familiar to the logo that we have today. Taking inspiration from the loading screen of a game we loved to play at the time, this logo featured an unoriginal globe icon on top of a gradient and a 20-point star.

The orange didn't stick around as our logo though, as we adopted a purple Earth for our main logo. Halloween vibes, anyone? This would be our final logo using purple:

...and we re-purposed that original orange logo for our 'Official Trixel Studios Support Team' that we had at the time:

Trixel Studios #2 - A Familiar Face

Our purple globe logo lasted a fair amount of time before we decided to ditch the purple for white. While the lines across the oceans were present in our purple logo, they became a lot more prominent in this revision.

This base logo remains our longest-used, sticking with us from 2014 until 2019 (with several tweaks in-between)! When we adopted this logo, we still referred to ourselves as 'Trixel Studios', but this would change later in 2014.

Trixel Creative Is Born

Slight tweaks were made during this change from Trixel Studios to Trixel Creative, including the switch to an original vector-based graphic (the official format for logos), the removal of the drop shadow, the addition of a white border, and the lessening of the star points to 18 instead of 20.

Whereas we also used a paper variant alongside the original orange starburst design in 2014, in 2017 we fully adopted a paper variant, channelling our crafty aesthetic.

2019 Modernisation

Around mid-2019 we started to create our own unique identity, separate from the crafty imagery that had inspired us so far. Instead, we decided to go for a more modern and minimal approach that (hopefully) made the branding more cohesive and approachable.

And here it is, the first new logo concept created by Halston for our 2019 re-branding:

As you can tell, our text logo and colour scheme were decided right away, but the logo itself still needed more work. This exploration phase saw many different concepts for our branding and came about after years of additional skill-building in graphic design. Here is another concept from the time:

We felt like these logos were lacking - and we enjoyed the symbolism that the original globe offered. As a result, we went back to a globe design - albeit designed from scratch (instead of re-using the design from the previous Trixel Creative logo):

And this is the image that settled the discussion! We went with the logo on the right - featuring a new gradient, a yet-again-reduced 12-point star, and a crescent shadow within the Earth itself.

Here's the updated design usage guide for this update:

This design scheme, which we call 'Coral', has stuck with us ever since then - though the logo itself was given yet another refresh in January of 2021.

Refreshing Coral

And here we are, the final chapter of our logo design scheme, the 2021 logo!

The aim of this 2021 refresh was to make the logo more suitable for scaling - such as on mobile devices, favicon, and our website. Again, we experimented with replacing the center design to feature symbolism that relates to craftiness and creativity. Here are some concepts from that time:

As evident by where we are today - we decided to stay with our established brand of the Earth. This logo featured a more simplified design of the continents, as well as a 10-point star - featuring 50% fewer vector paths/points than our original globe logo.

The reduction of the points on the star initially made the logo feel awkward to both ourselves and the community, but it quickly caught on as an improvement once the adjustment period had fizzled away.

Speaking of our star border, we even experimented with the removal of the border completely (we weren't a fan):

Later in 2021, our logo saw yet another slight revision which is now our current version. This change further simplified and polished the overall design by increasing margin/white/negative space and softening the continent shapes inside the globe.

...and there we are!

And now we're all caught up! How long will this logo last us? We're not sure, but we're the happiest we've ever been with our current design, and see it sticking around for a long while yet.

Let us know what you think of these new Trixel Diary posts by commenting below!