INTRODUCTION TO DREAMHOST
DreamHost has provided web hosting since 1997, which is quite a long time in the tech world. Launched in a college dorm room in Southern California, it grew into a company with hundreds of employees. They remian one of the few independent company-owned hosting services still available. They are big vocal advocates for online privacy and freedom of speech - landing them occasionally in hot water.
The company has had three notable logo designs since 1997, the last update being introduced in 2006. Throughout all of the past versions the moon icon was the visual anchor making it the most iconic piece on DreamHost's identity.
With the rebrand for DreamHost, we wanted to focus on the qualities that we felt set the company apart from the competition of other web hosting providers. As a company, we wanted to remain authentic, and passionate that cares about its community and users. For a tech company, DreamHost takes pride in shameless honesty, being irreverent and fun while still being professional. It was important to us that our values and personality came across which the original logo lacked.
The design team was tasked with develop a handful of concepts that incorporated the classic DreamHost look and feel, as well as some concepts that would push the envelope of change, and pitch them to the redesign committee. The committee consisted of our founders, as well as the CEO, the VP of Marketing and Communication, and a handful of other associates that we felt would benefit the project. We came back with a few different concepts that would be presented to the committee. Here’s a handful of those concepts:
The final three logos were presented at the quarterly company “All-Hands” event in front of the entire company. DreamHost is a very democratic company, and it was gratifying to share the hard work that had lead up to these concepts with our co-workers. The votes were tallied up, shared with our redesign committee - and the winner was a combination of the old and the new below.
The final logo is a nice update to the original one as it stays within familiar territory. It keeps the moon icon where much of our brand equity is, turning it around and setting it in an upward more positive direction. We also kept the camelcase while updating the typeface in the fuller rounder Futura case, giving it more confidence. The old tech color blues were axed as well making the updated blues feel warmer and more inviting. We shared our rebrand and full exploration on our company blog which can be found here.
THE DREAMHOST ROBOT
The collateral and swag that would accomany the new branding was equally important. One of the values of DreamHost is to be irreverent and fun, which we really took to heart. We wanted to make sure our personality shined through and would delight our users. The DreamHost robot became the embodiment of our playful personality and is incredebly popular with our fans. The little robots appeared frequently on our social media, company events, and in our swag.
Redesigning our event collateral included our product one sheet. Most one-sheets within tech are 8.5x11 print outs, with lots of tech jargon and specs. The standard product one-sheet went against our playful personality. Another pain point was most one-sheets get tossed in the trash shortly after the event is over. How do we encourage our customers to keep ours on hand?
Hence, the small foldable robot was born. I took the idea from a small foldable monster I had sitting on the desk from the day I was hired. I thought it would be fun for our users to be able to assemble and keep our little mascot on their desk as company. The robot was easy to assemble and packaged together with a one-sheet talking about DreamHost and our products. The instructions was a nod to my Swedish heritage borrowing from IKEA assembly instructions. It has been amazing to hear how this project has lived on. From giving it to their kids, or keeping the robot in their office for many years.
