Few people know of it, but me and Vivek had started working on HackerEarth even before we graduated from college. To be specific we were working on MyCareerStack, but few things that we did during that time laid the foundation for HackerEarth.
I graduated and moved to Bangalore in July 2012 to work at Google. 3 months later, we got accepted in GSF Accelerator and started HackerEarth officially in November 2012. From start we have been a very design focused company, our design might not have been very savvy, but it has always been functional and simple!
I have seen this very often these days, a lot of startups invest significantly in branding, even before they launch. We have been very different. For the last 3 years, we have been consciously putting off the topic of branding and having a logo for HackerEarth.
Of course, when you start need to have a logo, it goes in all the startup competitions where you apply, it goes on your very first visiting card, it goes on the T-shirt that you decide to wear everyday to office and it goes on your laptop. We had one too.
Doesn’t require Machine learning to understand this logo. We took the company name , chose a nice font and put it on a background color we liked. The logo is really simple, but it served it’s purpose, people recognize this.
For the last 3 years, we have consciously shied away from creating a logo, creating an identity. The less significant reason is that creating a logo takes a lot of thought, and hence a lot of time. And when you are running fast with a lean team, one tends to pass over frivolities as long as things are functional.
The actual reason is, the last 3 years have been about soul searching. When we started, back in 2012, we knew what we wanted to do, but we didn’t know it enough to have a clear identity. During this time, we have had our share of learnings, pivots, discoveries and changes.
Today I am happy to say we finally have the right amount of understanding to come up with our identity. And it might seem ironic but it’s no different from what me and Vivek started with. We knew we were building a platform for developers and we knew developers love to code. These two things have been core of everything we have done at HackerEarth, and nothing symbolizes that better than our brand new logo.
We have made a couple of changes to our identity, we dropped the camel case (it always gave a little corporatish look), dropped the Rockwell font, the new custom font is a little more casual, a bit more fun and the ‘h’ embodies the spirit of a programmer – code. If you didn’t get what I mean see this
The logo is an attempt to represent what HackerEarth truly is, we are a platform for hackers and like each and every one of you, we are equally passionate about writing code, writing better code and being a better programmer every single day.
