Our Blog: The Story of the Prominent Logo

Welcome to the new Prominent website! You might be wondering what is behind all of the changes. In this article, I will explain the “why” behind the rebranding as well as reveal the hidden meanings in our newly launched logo and our previous logo. A team at Prominent has been working hard on this rebranding for the past few months and we are excited to share it with you. But, before we get into the new logo, let’s talk about how we got here. I am going to start the story all the way at the beginning…

For the first 3 years that Prominent existed, there was no logo. As you can see in the above picture, we rocked the words Prominent Technology in Calibri on our agreements and business cards.

In the fall of 2012, we commissioned a graphic design company out of Washington to design Prominent's first logo. Through the design process, a few themes emerged which we wanted to be part of the logo:

Big letter P

You can see that the logo is in the shape of the letter “P.” “P” words have been part of Prominent's culture from the beginning. Trying to name everything around here with a word that starts with P has been fun and stretched our vocabulary.

Power Symbol

We wanted something to symbolize technology in our logo and the power symbol was what we settled on. As you can see, the logo contains a power symbol for the O in technology and another power symbol is the round part of the P.

Tree

Some of the words used to describe the Prominent difference were strong, reliable, and trustworthy. From these words, the image of a tree emerged. The logo was designed to be a tree, a power symbol, and a P – all at the same time.

This logo has served us well over the years. It has graced a lot of company swag, including shirts, hats, beanies, cooler bags, beach towels, coffee mugs, water bottles, flashlights, and, most importantly, high-quality backpacks… just to name a few. This logo will forever have a special place in the hearts (and sometimes on the skin) of the faithful Posse.

Over the years the Prominent logo has begun to show its age and the graphically-inclined people who have joined the team have suggested it is time for re-branding. While the logo is endearing, the sentiment was that the current logo (and, Prominent's branding in general) didn't reflect Prominent's culture, technical prowess, or quality.

Let's discuss all the ingredients that make this logo great.

Color

We are officially calling this color "muted mustard". This color was chosen because it invokes the spirit of Prominent - warm, fun, unique, yet still professional. The color somehow leaps out at you without being obnoxious.

Custom font

You might have noticed the unique font in this logo. The Prominent typeface is a custom font that is heavily based off of the Adobe font Urbane with features pulled from the fonts Acrom and Scarlet. This font was designed to be bold like our team, optically balanced to represent stability, and easily readable to be versatile and usable in all different sizes.

Logo design

Our desire was that the new logo was a nod to the old logo. We hoped that the P, or the power symbol, or the tree could make it into the new logo. This logo exceeded our expectations by incorporating all three (go look for yourself). If that wasn't enough, it also incorporated a theme that has been a growing part of Prominent over the past few years – a bulls-eye. We often tell our customers that our aim is to hit the center of the bulls-eye and meet their exact needs.

Shortened name

The final thing I want to point out is the conspicuously missing the second part of the company name. We dropped the word Technology from our company name. We are now called Prominent. There are a number of reasons for this change. Here are a couple of them:

1. "Prominent Technology" is hard to say.
   • Those of us who work the business development side have to introduce our company name multiple times every day. After saying the name of our company out loud thousands of times, it still doesn't roll off of the tongue.
2. "Technology" isn't descriptive to what we do
   • While we originally included the word Technology in the name to be descriptive of our business, the truth is that the word Technology doesn't tell anyone what we do. If we want a descriptive name, we should be named something like "Prominent Enterprise-Level Custom Software Solutions and Other Services.”

If you are like me, you might have some apprehension in regard to the changes to our branding. That's ok! In my experience, logo and branding changes often feel awkward when I first encounter them. But, as you start to look at it more, I am confident that you will warm up to the brand. In an effort to expedite that warming-up period, I want you to do a quick exercise with me. Scroll up to the top of this announcement and look at the old logo. Now scroll down and look at the new one. Absorb the changes a little. If the new logo doesn't immediately feel cleaner, fresher, more professional, and more representative of who we are, then scroll up again, and scroll down again. I am confident if you look between the two, you will see this is a change in the right direction.

I want to end with a huge shout out to the Prominent team on this rebranding effort. They have done an incredible job of bringing together all the input from all the voices in the room to make something that announces who we are to the world. They are the living embodiment of the culture that we are trying to depict in our logo.