Design Collaboration Right in Confluence

Why a complete redesign?

The plan to remake Addteq’s Excellentable plugin to a completely new product, created the idea to do a whole logo redesign.

“When Excellentable 3.1 is ready to be released, my mission is for people to look at it like a brand new product, other than a version release,” said Sukhbir Dhillon, founder of Addteq.

Sukhbir Dhillon, founder of Addteq and Paula Ramsey, graphic designer at Addteq, are the masterminds behind the new and improved logo design. They combined original thoughts, designs and concepts, followed competitor’s themes and went through over 200 logo ideas, layouts and working images to come up with the final logo design. Of course the entire Addteq team became involved when Paula began sharing and tagging team members within a Confluence page for insight on what she was creating! With creating that first page, Paula began to use Confluence to collaborate with other Addteq team members.

Providing a mockup of the logo was actually part of Paula’s interview process. After she saw a demo of Exellentable during her in-person interview, she had to go home and create what she thought the revamped logo should look like. She was obviously on the right track because her first task as a new employee with Addteq, start the redesign of the Excellentable logo. This logo was the very first representation of what the new logo was going to become.

Designing Begins!

The entire process was completed through Confluence. Paula created a variety of pages, throughout the process, in Confluence where she tagged members of the Addteq team to discuss themes, ideas and insight on any mockups Sukhbir and herself had already approved. When collaborating through Confluence and HipChat the team began finding a trend that there were major details that take priority for the logo design. One of the Addteq team’s biggest priorities was color, there should be absolutely no pinks or purples and that shades of blue and green are best. The logo also needed to be representative of a spreadsheet. Which that, below shows round 1 of the design and collaboration stages.

Paula remembers that when going back to the team for their thought of the first edits, “They decided on shades of green because green seems to be an identifiable color for spreadsheet softwares, probably due to it’s representation of money or finances.” Which, as seen below with competitor logos, seems to be true. Addteq wanted to make sure that the Excellentable logo did not plagiarize from the known industry spreadsheet products below, but still be representative of a spreadsheet software like the competitor logos are.

“We wanted to keep with the same general concepts as the competitors, but wanted Excellentable to have it’s own identity,” said Jaclyn DePinho, Marketing Specialist at Addteq.

Now We Are Getting Closer!

After version 1 of the logo was rejected, Paula went back to the drawing board to come up with something totally different that better represented a spreadsheet. Below are some of the images that she created.

Part of Addteq’s week includes a “Beer and Brag” session every Friday. This is were the team comes together to talk about our latest projects, brag a little about recent accomplishments and receive feedback and praise from the rest of the team members. During one of these beer and brag sessions, the current developments of the Excellentable logo were being displayed. The team noticed that everyone kept going back to the green and rounded shaped mockups that Paula had presented. Maybe because the green logo was very crisp and stuck out more, while the rounded mockup matched other Addteq product logos. With this latest poll between team members, the ideas really started to grow. Above logos were eventually rejected, but three features were chosen by the team to move forward.

Stick to a green color
The round shape
Abstract graph

With mentoring, collaboration, polls and tons of trial and error rounds, below are the samples that Paula had made that helped to shape the current Excellentable logo.

The final round of suggestions and changes to above designs really created the new logo. From the colorful mockups above, everyone at Addteq gave giant thumbs up to the chosen image below. But something was still not right, and something was missing.

Sukhbir said that “I think I want this image on some type platform and the symbols for sigma, integration and function incorporated somewhere within the logo.”

A ton of the members of the team also noticed something was missing and said it did not fully represent a spreadsheet. Paula went back yet again to use above, approved logo and make it seem more representative as a spreadsheet software. Below images are the result of that mockup.

Collectively in Confluence, Addteq team members decided that maybe the symbols just won’t work inside of a logo. Paula went back in, got rid of the symbols and kept with the original design she started with. Paula created another set of mockups, 10 more to be exact, and updated her Confluence page for team approval. Finally, after months of hard work, suggestions, changes, comparisons and over 200 designs, the Excellentable logo is finally complete!

Everyone at Addteq is extremely proud of this new logo and the new and improved plugin that it represents. Giant kudos go to Paula Ramsey, Sukhbir Dhillon and the entire Addteq team for collaborating together and working so hard to create such a great looking logo!