Designing the Wing Logo

Hey everyone! Amiel the designer here. I’m here to talk about my process in creating the Wing logo, and share some of the thoughts that went into creating our now beloved symbol. Let’s get into it.

The first thing you need to know about designing a logo is that it’s not as simple as it sounds. There are many things a good logo has to be: aesthetic, memorable, elegant, simple, the list goes on and on. Some examples from our day to day lives are Nike and Apple; I’m sure that their logos are clear as day in your mind’s eye. Hours and hours of work go into even the smallest changes to logos in order to maximize their effectiveness. For good reason! A good logo can make the difference between being one brand among thousands and being the brand among thousands. So, when I started the process of designing, I knew I had an important challenge ahead.

The first stage of any design is research. Asking questions. What are you designing? Who is it for? What does it need to convey? Well, I’m designing a logo. It’s for a programming language called Wing. As for what it needs to convey, we’ve hit our first speed bump. What does it need to convey? How do I even know? More research, of course! Every brand has its values, the ideas that stand behind it, and I had to identify what those were in order to start designing. Luckily for me, the team at Wing Cloud already had a solid vision of the brand values for Winglang, so narrowing these down wasn’t a solo effort. Now that the values were set, I moved on to the next step.

Freedom, abstraction, flight, creativity. Themes and ideas that I needed to mesh together into a simple graphic representation. I started sketching, stylizing some ‘W’s, making some wing shapes, seeing what shapes I could come up with that evoked all of the themes while still looking good, the works.

Sketching a whole lot is something every designer does when feeling out a new concept, it’s really an invaluable part of the creative process. Through this, I started making a few symbols as a first batch:

As you can see, these symbols are only distantly related to the current Wing logo, I still had work to do. I tried going in a completely different direction, focusing on the creative and personal side of code creation with a hand-drawn wing symbol:

Not it, either. It was then suggested that I use the tilde symbol as an anchor point in my design process, and so I did; looking at dozens of differently shaped tildes and building different tilde shapes again and again.

I could feel like I was getting closer, but the tilde shape just wasn’t doing it for me. There was, however, something about its wave shape that I really liked. I started researching waves in general, and how they related to flight. Besides a whole lot of aerodynamic knowledge I’ll probably never use again, one thing that caught my eye was parabolic flight.

Parabolic flight is a flight pattern used to simulate zero-gravity. A plane carrying passengers will fly up sharply, then at a certain point level off into a dive. For about 20 seconds, those on board will experience weightlessness, after which gravity will return. The plane flies this way over and over again, creating a parabolic wave with its flight pattern. I read up on this and knew I had a thread; here was a concept that embodied most of what I wanted to convey with the log - flight, freedom, weightlessness, it all fit. Now I had to figure out how it was going to incorporate it into my design.

I started messing around with wave shapes, creating symbols, trying to figure out how I was going to use the parabolic flight pattern. I ended up spacing out two of the waves, adding a line for the zenith of the arc, and using them to create our logo!

This time, I could feel that I had it. Here was a shape that represented everything I was going for; flight, weightlessness, freedom. It even looked like a 'W'. I presented the logo, it was accepted, and the rest is history :)

Thanks for reading!

Amiel