(Hello Hive); First Post: Hive - becoming of the brand

When working on the hardfork for the past month, one gets to think a lot about what Steem actually is was. As I already talked about in my "I wont give up" post a couple of days ago I concluded that the core thing about our blockchain is the community. Not the apps, not the transactions, but the interactions. We are a social blockchain after all, and people do matter.

So yes, Hive it is! Some backstories:

While dev team was working hard on making the fork happen on the blockchain frontend, for days may brainstormed a new name for the new home. Ultimately in yet another brainstorm session it was @jarvie who coined the term Hive as an abreviation of @good-karma's suggestion Hivemind. It stuck immediately.

Obviously one thing internet people do is checking whether OK domains are still available. Now with a word so generic as "Hive" this was obviously going to be a problem. And with many people having ideas many more names came by. In the end there was a list of 120 names for the chain after which a couple of voting rounds finally Hive stuck with most of the people, followed by "Clout" and "Carbon" which I personally also found a good one, referring to Graphene software.

Some alternatives like my suggested Hiive was voted out as well as combo words such as HiveNetwork, Hivebase, etcetera. So Hive it was after a final "yes/no" vote where 100% voted for.

Hive, representing a real home for a buzzing community. Structured and ample place for many. You can come and go whenever you like, but it would be great if it is sticky enough for you :)

A hunt for domain was on and after an offer of 500 USD to the NIC of dot-IO-domains - they accepted for the premium "hive.io" domain and 1 day later I was the happy owner of hive.io. Mind you this was the most I have ever paid for a domain in my life. Note that the domain is now only managed by me, but with full intentions once a foundation of some sort is formed to donate the domain to this foundation (maybe I will ask a little fee for handling the registration, if you allow me :D).

Now some words about the logo:

I'm not a designer, I did not study for it. Nor am I a developer, I did not study for it. Yet i have been working officially since 2000's on computers and from 2004 onwards as my sole profession. So I know some of the tricks in Photoshop, Macromedia Flash (ring a bell anyone), Illustrator and the likes.

As soon as we had the name, I started blurping in Illustrator for a bit because thats what I like, making something out of nothing. No responses on my first drawings, and I don't blame anyone, because, look at it:

In the discussions revolving around the logo I suggested to outsource to 99Designs.com yet the idea was to stay under the radar for a little longer. Plus, very true, we have gifted designers in our community! Incoming @derangedvisions who started blurping and came up with a hex logo ideas like the following:

Very nice, multi-facetted like a gem, and that's what it is this little chain of ours. As feedback I asked him, maybe see if it can have less facets, some more spacing in between (for scaling) and maybe some rounder edges. I also saw something (an 'H') in his logo, and, shamelessly cut it up and suggested this one:

We were spending our last days of the family-trip in Bangkok and, wonderful city, but all on my mind was Hive. And also this branding. So in my mind I was kind of drawing something up, based on the feedback I mentioned just above.

When we came back home from a pool swim I fired up Sketch and started fiddling with the Hexagon and my mind and then within 15 minutes a draft was done. I showed it to my girlfriend and she liked it very much. As you might notice from posting all this, I was also pretty happy about it...

So I posted it on the branding workgroup chat and being morning in Asia, most folks in US had just gone to bed, and Europe was still sleeping. So I was anxiously waiting for responses...

Then slowly they came in. First one from Hidden84, a brand designer by profession, and he found it "really good". Humble bow 🙇from me. More people woke up and overall positivity. People asked for different colors and it iterated a bit.

@nateaguilla, maker of many logos and other design elements for the (formerly known as Steem) ecosystem, came by with a professional designer look. He came with suggestions to widen and even out some elements and then I iterated over it some more, until the final result you see now everywhere!

Needless to say, as a non designer, this is my best work ever. And I am damn proud that it is (for now :D) the icon for our home! FYI: download the brand assets on the pretty & neat website @therealwolf https://hive.io/brand

So that is how to logo came to be. Now what does it represent? I'm not certain I should tell you this, because, it's maybe a bit spoiler alert...

The key-visual, "The Hextacular" translates into many different things:

• The Hex - polygon (You know, the foundation of the hive)
• A diapositive 'H'
• You can see a 3D block
• You can see arrows forward indicating continuation, block after block
• And... with some creativity you can even see somewhat of a "fist in the air": resistance, which is the cause of birth of the fork!
• The logo is simplified, easy to scale, recognisable without text because of diapositive H.

Finetuning some colors and here we are...

Home is where the Hive is. Welcome home. Hive on!

Yes! This logo design is opensource. It is not trademarked, yet that might become the case (i don't know) if an official legal entity is formed around Hive which will maintain the domain as well. I will then donate ownership of the Brand IP to this foundation.

Be kind: Please respect the logo in its current form and try to reuse the current official versions whenever you need to add the Hive logo to any of your own projects, presentations and publications. Find the official branding page on https://hive.io/brand, with logo downloads.