Introducing our updated logo, meet Mandy

Ausdroid’s logo is something we’re all really proud of here at Ausdroid, to us it is both a metaphor for our unique Australian perspective on Android, as well as a symbol of something we are all proud to be a part of. That said Andy, as he is affectionately known among the team, was starting to look a little dated since he was first envisaged by Lucas in 2010, so we’ve been discussing for some time how to give him a modern facelift without removing any of the elements that make him special to us.

Jumping to the end of the story, we finally arrived at Andy’s material inspired update, so we are pleased to introduce you to Andy’s Material cousin, Mandy! Do you want to know a little of our thinking behind Mandy, and perhaps even understand a little more about our beloved logo? Read on to find out more.

Considering our origins in both Android and the wider Google sphere we were obviously immediately drawn to Google’s material design specification when looking at our logo refresh. We churned through the design guide, read to how-to guides and scoured dozens if not hundreds of material design examples. But before we could go to much further in we had to decide what was important to keep?

For those who don’t know our logo is a combination of the original “bug droid” Android head and the Australian flag, but did you know that the left and right sides of Andy’s face are actually a stylised A and D, Aus-droid? If you didn’t, you do now! We felt that these elements were the quintessential elements of what the logo was and as such, we wanted to carry them over. While this may have limited our options, it also focused our attention on what it was about Andy that needed updating.

To begin with, we went full material, and if you’re going to do bold block colors surely you would use the “official” colours of the Australia Flag. To this, we experimented with the concept of ‘quantum paper’ with different elements of the design being at varying heights and casting shadows. We decided that the black outlines — which worked well for a number of years — were the major dating factor, so they were axed!

What we ended up with was the first material-inspired Ausdroid Logo. However, the colours were a little harsh and somehow it felt like it was too much of a departure from our beloved Andy. We went back and both softened the colours, as well as adding in a graduation effect, to give the logo a lighter, cleaner feel.

The final step was perhaps the easiest, tackling the fonts. We’re not Google ,so we couldn’t hold a week-long design summit to design our own font, and thanks to Google we really didn’t have to. For the text of Ausdroid, we chose the new “Android Font” in keeping with our heritage. For any supporting text, like our current “Award winning tech news” tagline, we chose a font inspired by Google’s Product Sans.

Our first run with Mandy used thinner fonts, however, whilst it looked clean it did not scale well across different form factors and the text became very pixelated; we had to thicken things up a bit. You may also notice we were experimenting with not having the material shadow lines in some versions, but it looks a bit plain doesn’t it!

A few more font packs, a little more tweaking and we arrived at the current iteration of Mandy, our Material Andy:

We hope you like the update to the Ausdroid Logo; we traveled a long way to end up very close to where we began, and we think that’s a good thing. In the end, we wanted a refresh, not an entirely new rebrand, and we think that Mandy gives us that.

Let us know what you think of the Ausdroid logo update in the comments.