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The Ultimate Responsive Logo

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Fugue Website

The New York-based design agency Sagmeister & Walsh has taken a very musical approach with their visual identity for Fugue, a cloud software management brand with a distinctly stylish vibe. The idea was to create an identity that stood apart from the brand's competitors, and it has achieved this by designing not just a logo that responds to touch and sound, but a whole suite of gorgeous interactive graphic elements. The package is based around that glorious logo, which was designed to represent the ephemeral nature of Fugue's automatically regeneration cloud software; a system that helps to automatically manage operations and maintenance of cloud infrastructure running on Amazon Web Service.

The New York-based design agency Sagmeister & Walsh has taken a very musical approach with their visual identity for Fugue

Jessica Walsh, co-founder of Sagmeister & Walsh, said “When learning about the software,” what stood out to them was the importance of ephemerality. She said that Fugue had asked them “To design a brand that visualised this ephemerality and embodied their core attributes of lineage and elegance.” In response, Walsh and her team set to work creating a logo from a series of inky lines and dots, with a fluid style that “Pays homage to the calligraphy of a broad-nib pen.” When visitors to Fugue's website click on the logo, or use a smart device to touch it, the logo reacts in kind, but even with a hands-free approach, it continues to shift to the music, almost as if it's dancing.

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Walsh said the logo “Works like the software does; it constantly regenerates itself while data moves from one point to another.” In other words, it's an identity that visualises how the company's software works, which is a pretty fascinating concept! She added that "Fugue wanted to move away from the masculine tech and security graphics that they see often at trade shows,” and “They wanted the brand to be elegant, and stand out against the current tech and security landscape.” These mandates were “Key factors in choosing the colour palette and typefaces,” which she believes are unusual and unexpected in the industry.

The identity is based around the GT Sectra typeface, which was chosen because Fugue wanted a font that was contemporary but also had its roots in history

The identity is based around the GT Sectra typeface, which she adds was chosen because they wanted “A font that was contemporary but also had its roots in history,” to reflect the company's philosophy that lineage is important to their core values. They also chose “A mono font to accompany GT Sectra that worked well optically for programming code demonstrations for the software.”

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The studio also produced an app that lets users import a line drawing that will be regenerated in the style of the new Fugue logo, underlining the flexible nature of the identity. There's also a nifty drawing feature that lets artistically minded users draw abstract visuals using their tablet or smartphone. Perhaps most excitingly of all, however, is a piece of software designed by the firm to show off at trade shows, which allows users to load music from their own digital library. A logo will then be generated and react to the beat of whatever piece of music is fed into it.

The studio also produced an app that lets users import a line drawing that will be regenerated in the style of the new Fugue logo

The team at S&W said “The name Fugue, references music composition made famous by composers like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.” The creators of the software are also all former musicians (hence the company name), and “Functionalities in the software reference terminology from music,” so they “Wanted to pay homage to this in the branding.” Also, for those who were wondering; “A fugue is a contrapuntal compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject (theme) that is introduced at the beginning in imitation (repetition at different pitches) and recurs frequently in the course of the composition.” Thank YOU Wikipedia!

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