Last week, my team and I at Oboe learned that we won the Red Dot Design Award for Brand & Communication Design. We’re tremendously proud of our brand and the work that went into it. And we were honored to receive the award, as Red Dot is often cited as one of the most important design competitions in the world.

So I thought it might be fun to share a bit about what went into creating the Oboe brand. My background is not in design (and in fact, I’m by all measures a genuinely bad designer). Yet the experience that went into giving Oboe its brand identity has been one of my favorite parts of this journey so far. I want to specifically thank Wayne Wu and his team at Work of the People, as well as Anna Sian, for all of their amazing work in bringing this to life.

The Kickoff

About one year ago, we kicked off the project. Consider that with nothing but a general mission (“Build the learning platform of the future”) and a half-baked product in beta, the small Oboe team needed to manifest a brand that would work for our launch as well as all future (then unknowable) product iterations that were bound to come. And boy have there been a lot.

So developing a brand is unlike anything I’ve had to do before. You’re creating something from nothing, and given the expense and effort that goes into it, you’re hoping this thing has enough longevity and adaptability to last for years.

All we had to start was our name, Oboe, which I chose a year earlier from a pool of options when my friend and investor Matt Hartman reacted to it by saying, “You should pick Oboe. Because who would name their company Oboe? And I mean that in a good way.” That sealed it.

The team and I kicked off the branding exercise by first looking at the multiple spectra on which we’d be measured and deciding where we wanted to fall.

These sliders help distill the various dimensions that factor into a brand and deconstruct them into separate focusable traits. For instance, on the spectrum of “Academic” to “Co-Learner”, you can think of brands such as National Geographic sitting on one extreme and Substack sitting on the other.

There are dozens of these dimensions. Did we want to be perceived as a teacher or a friend? Did we want to be serious or funny? Did we want to feel tangible or abstract?

It’s interesting to reflect now on how different our brand and the perception of Oboe might have been if, when presented with the sliders at the very beginning, we had nudged some of our preferences a bit to the left or a bit to the right.

The Ideation

The hardest work (and the incredible skill that folks like Anna, Wayne, and Work of the People have) comes when you have to figure out how to take those abstract preferences along the spectra and map them to concrete ideas.

They got their hands dirty very quickly, spinning up ideas seemingly ever hour, and receiving our feedback in real time to double down on things that we thought were working.

Here are some early sketches for branding ideas, just to show the sheer range of options with which we were presented:

I found it particularly challenging not only to communicate what worked and didn’t work for me in these designs, but also to express why. For instance, in that last one, I liked the bunny, but I didn’t love the font. Why? I don’t think I possess the typographical vocabulary necessary to explain it. It’s a feeling. And after all, isn’t a feeling what we’re trying to elicit with our brand?

The A-Ha

After a surprisingly few rounds of iteration, the team at Work of the People presented this:

And though it wasn’t perfect, it stirred something in me that none of the others had.

Good branding, I find, is like true love. You don’t have the words to describe it. You don’t know what it’s supposed to look like. But you trust that when you see it, you’ll know. Here, the team and I knew.

As for why? I’ll give it a try: The lightness, the accessibility, the approachability, the curiosity, the relevance to the concept of rabbit holes, the sense of discovery. It was playful without being overtly comical. It was welcoming and familiar while looking unlike anything I’d seen.

To paraphrase what my friend Matt might have said, “Who would name their company Oboe and brand it with a mysterious hole out of which things magically appear? And I mean that in a good way.”

The Output

Once we knew the direction, the rest came naturally.

The logo was perfected:

There are so many subtle things I love about our logo. The general sans-serif-ness with a little hint of sophistication hanging off the top of the B. The slanted O, and in particular the fact that it is not even the first O that’s slanted. The repetition of the open spaces inside of every letter, which uniquely works with a word like Oboe.

The iconography:

The color palette:

And of course, the bunny:

Through all the evolution the product has had in the past year, I’ve never felt that the branding was anything but perfect. That’s because it captures our mission and our tone without needing to capture any specific implementation. To me, that’s what the best brands do.

If you haven’t used Oboe in a while or at all, the product has evolved considerably. I’d love for you to try it out for free at oboe.com to learn anything and everything that piques your interest.

And we have a lot of other very exciting stuff in the works. Stay tuned :)

— Nir