My Startup Story #8: Hilarious Logo/UI Progressions
By: Alexander Finden
Tags: Startup Life, UI Design, Startup, Founder Stories, Ui Ux Design

As promised, I’m dedicating this blog to the evolution of the Mammalz logo and user interface (UI). I hope you find as much enjoyment as I do when you browse through these early renditions of “the new way to experience nature”.

Determining a Name and Logo

Before I had met Rob and he had even secured the name Mammalz, he had experimented with some other potential brands and icons. As you can see, bison horns were always part of the picture, as was the blue-green gradient, representing both water and land ecosystems.

The idea of a name that represented our human relationship to the rest of life on Earth was something Rob locked in on. We, of course, are mammals, just like our closest primate relatives, our dogs and cats, and even the egg-laying echidna. We have undergone the same number of years of evolution as all other life that exists today, so why do we separate ourselves? Reminding people of their mammalian roots was so important that Rob decided it should be the name of this new company, hence Mammalz. But, why the Z? Simple: the domain Mammals with an S costs $50,000. Ha! More importantly, though, we felt Mammals with an S restricted us from defining ourselves as more than just a platform for sharing content about mammals. Add the Z, and it becomes a new word that can be defined as whatever we create it to be (throwback to Bratz, am I right?).

After a few months of repeating the company name and the discovery of our community-rallying slogan “We Are Mammalz”, the name stuck, as did our new tagline: The new way to experience nature.

I’d like to point out one interesting difference between the last two button logos. Though we had decided on the blue-green gradient, you might be able to see there is quite a bit more blue in the 3rd generation logo. As my scuba diving, ocean-biased self, I thought it would be clever to make the gradient 71% blue and 29% green, the ratio of water to land on Earth. We later decided the green helped differentiate us from other platforms like Facebook, so the 50/50 gradient with brighter hues was made official.

On to Platform Development!

Prior to reaching San Diego, Rob and I played around quite a bit with simple tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides to create the various platform screens we had envisioned. Some of these demos made their way into our first pitch decks.

Did you catch the “Lynx” tab? Links? Get it? We are so clever.

You might remember from my 7th blog in the series that near the end of 2018, a UI/UX expert helped us learn how to design the Mammalz apps. Rob and I were determined that we had enough creativity in our bones to be our own UI designers, so with this newfound technical knowledge, we created working demos of the Mammalz app for both web and iOS.

To our surprise, these designs were nearly signed off as-is by the professional UI/UX team at our development accelerator a few months later. I guess we did have some creative bones!

Small tweaks to the user interface have been made since Mammalz was released into beta. Today, with a resident expert in user experience and design at Mammalz, we are constantly using the feedback and recommendations from our community to plan future improvements and ensure our users have the best cross-platform experience. You’ll get a peek at some of these new designs when we launch Mammalz on the App Store this Earth Day.

Curious to learn more about Mammalz and even join us as an owning member of the community? We’re active on Wefunder.