RemarkableUX logo puts user experience front and centre

A clean and simple logo is an important part of the user experience. It gives your site, applications and general offer a face and helps recognition.

Remember, we are not designers. Your logo does not need fancy graphics; a simple text logo is usually good enough.

For RemarkableUX I want a text logo with an emphasis on user experience (UX). On the other hand, it must also bring in the remarkable idea, in the sense of standing out and being easy to talk about.

After some quick sketches I came up with this logo. I think the emphasis on UX is clear. The word remarkable stands out above the UX. The handwriting font brings in a human element to offset against the UX block.

So, what font is the UX then?

The UX is set in Delicious Heavy, a professional-quality free font from Jos Buivenga. This font has some interesting details, especially when set large and heavy.

If you are interested in fonts then I can recommend this interview with the Dutch art director and type designer Jos on how he works and why he makes his fonts available for free.

I compressed the UX 50% vertically to give the logo a “wide-screen” feel. At 100% the UX was too large and the logo ended square. I tightened the intercharacter spacing by 3% to keep the U and X together.

A remarkable contrast

The handwriting font for remarkable is Felt Tip Roman. I bought this font from The Font Shop and have used it on previous projects. I like this font as it gives a more personal feeling, like someone writing on a whiteboard.

Mark Simonson created this font in 1989. It was one of the first handwriting fonts:

This is one of my most popular fonts, and the first one I released. You’ve probably seen it in ads for Marriott, posters for the film Memento, and Alamo Car Rental, and practically everywhere else. It is popular with children’s book publishers, and it was cool to see it used as Hagrid’s handwriting in the Harry Potter books.

The font is Mark’s own handwriting. He carefully digitized it by hand, rather than using the lower-quality auto tracing approach. On his web site Mark has a copy of the original artwork, which he sketched on the back of a phone message pad!