Pixel Pond. How a Design-Centric approach drives our business.
Deciding on a name is hard, partly because when you name something you attach permanency to it. When we started Pixel Pond, the hardest part was deciding on a name. The original idea was ‘Go-Getter’, and then, ‘Bit by Bit’. Other ideas were floated too — but they all felt wrong, either because they had too much-implied meaning (‘Go-Getter’ being a good example of lacking subtlety!) or none at all.
‘Pixel Pond’ felt right. ‘Pond’ resonates with the well-known saying within recruitment, ‘talent pool’. But rather than ‘pool’, we preferred the word ‘pond’. ‘Pond’ captures the idea of birth, growth, vitality and difference. A pond is a community, a shared space, one which is full of life and rich in diversity. In a pond, difference thrives and relationships are key to survival. A vague metaphor, perhaps, but it offered a number of words which we could really relate to — diversity, growth, community, collaboration — something which provided a foundation for our brand, our identity and our values.
The colour came next and like the name, we wanted our colour to help define our brand. Sitting down with a colour specialist, we came to see why colour should never be a mere after-thought and, of course, in the creative industry, it rarely is. You only need to think about the colours associated with the biggest brands to see how much a colour can suggest. Google’s sequence of blue-green-yellow-red, for example, immediately suggests a playfulness, youth and energy, which is so central to their brand. Monzo’s hot coral — unique, quirky and eccentric in all the right ways — certainly achieves their aim to stand out amongst the deep purples, greens and blues of most mainstream bank cards. Colour is significant and full of meaning.
In our case, ‘pond’, with its obvious connection to water and nature, suggested green. The colour specialist helped us see that naming (as well as choosing) the colour would allow us to further distinguish ourselves. In other words, we didn’t just want to be ‘Green’. We discussed Aqua Green, Parakeet, Shamrock…We then looked through Werner’s ‘Nomenclature of Colours’ (an incredible early nineteenth-century guide to colour and its classification) and noticed just how much meaning can be contained within a colour. Looking through Werner’s findings, we discovered the colour Pistachio, which suggested to us a fantastic vibrancy (it’s hard to explain why). But Pistachio seemed “too green”, so, we combined it with the serenity of Blue. The best way to describe our colour, then, was ‘Pistachio Blue’.
The Pistachio Blue was eye-catching and beautiful. And since, from the beginning, we wanted to create a sense of authenticity and reliability around our brand, the calming effect of our Pistachio Blue seemed ideal: it is mellow and unassuming, but also confident and memorable. Not quite as mild as Duck Egg, but not as intense as Emerald. We used colour as a guide to our marketing and to further refine our values, specifically in terms of the kind of service we wanted to offer our partners. With name and colour in place, we were able to bring into close association a host of ideas and senses which meant something to us: through the name, we invoke diversity, growth, community, collaboration; and through the mild (yet memorable) serenity of our colour, we want to communicate authenticity, reliability and trust.
Design, brand and values have been at the heart of every decision we make and have made since our foundation. And through our partners across the creative industry, we see more and more just how much design matters. It is not simply an aesthetic matter. (It is not just to do with selling.) It is to do with harnessing meaning — sending signals, ideas, and messages which resonate — through names, colour, type and so on. In our case, design connects to our values. That is how we use it and want to use it.
