My name is Jess Chitas and I am an intern at Red Hat focusing on contributing to the Fedora community. Over the past couple of months, I have been fortunate enough to work on the new Nest, Flock, and Hatch logos as well as — Colúr — a new Fedora character! In this post, I document my journey from creating Colúr to revamping the Nest, Flock, and Hatch logos!

Creation of Colúr

Related ticket: https://pagure.io/design/issue/807

In creating Colúr (pronounced Co-loor), the main idea was to create a character that was some sort of bird. Nest, Flock and Hatch all involve around birds, so we wanted to keep with the existing theme. When looking at the original Nest logo, I saw it used a dove, so doves were on the table. Fedora has the 4 F’s and the colors associated with them, so I wanted to work off of a colorful bird. I came across a bird called the pink-necked green pigeon and it was perfect! 

I collaborated with Madeline Peck for the design of Colúr, since I was quite stuck as to what art style to draw the bird in. I also took a LinkedIn Learning course to help me with character design. Below are Madeline’s sketches that were super helpful in creating Colúr:

The great thing that I love about Red Hat and the Fedora community is that collaboration is so important! It was so easy to collaborate with Madeline and Marie Nordin (the creator of the ticket) for feedback and new ideas! Below are my iterations of Colúr and how the design of him evolved into what he is now!

I wasn’t too sure about my first iteration. It looked off to me. The bird was very static looking and didn’t really have any expression on their face. Originally, I wanted Colúr to be a motherly-type character. The idea of Mary Poppins came to Máirín Duffy and me! This is where the hat comes in. I also wanted to add a feather to the hat, but with Red Hat’s hat, I didn’t want to get into any complications. 

I went back to the drawing board and took another look at Madeline’s sketches of the birdies. I wanted to add boots to Colúr. I had the idea of giving him wellington boots as; I thought it was cute and it also reminded me of a book I had when I was younger about a baby duck. He always had these red wellies on and I thought it would be cute to add them to Colúr! Below is the final design for Colúr:

I wanted to then experiment with different facial expressions and poses for Colúr as well. Here are some other iterations I created and finalized in Inkscape: 

After creating Colúr, we had to name him. Máirín Duffy came up with the name Colúr as it resembles the English word ‘colour’ but Colúr actually stands for pigeon in Irish! So it was meant to be, really! 

Creation of Nest/Flock/Hatch logos

Here are the final iterations of the Nest, Flock and Hatch logos! But let’s rewind back to the start and how it all came about. 

When creating Colúr, we wanted to make a logo for Nest that incorporated a character as well as the Nest logotype. That is, until we came up with the idea to make a separate mascot that will be more centered towards Nest, Flock, and Hatch and then have separate logotypes for Nest and friends. We went with that new idea. 

Initial Ideas

Altogether, I wanted to have breaks in the logo that were reminiscent of the break in the Fedora ‘F’. Next, I added curves to the ‘n’ in the nest and ‘t’ in the hatch as I thought it gave a softness to the logotypes and made them look more natural. I also wanted each logo to tell a story by having a symbol incorporated. I will elaborate on that more with each individual logo.

With Nest, I kind of knew what I wanted from the get go. I tested out the gaps and curves and maybe a way to attach some of the letters to each other as well. After many meetings, we decided that it would be cool to add a nest element. For example, we picked the symbol of the tree and how birds keep their nest in trees and trees are homes to birds similar to how Nest is  a virtual event that you can attend when at home. Here is the initial creation process of the Nest logo:

For the Flock logo, it was a similar design process with the breaks however for the symbolism in the logo, I decided to use feathers. The quote “birds of a feather flock together” came to mind when I thought of Flock and what it stands for so I wanted to add feathers into the design. Here is the creative process of creating the Flock logo:

As you can see by the thought process, I was initially thinking of creating the feathers. I also experimented with creating a feather-like design on the back of the ‘k’ but I wasn’t too keen on it. With feedback, I then added little tufts of fluff onto the feathers as the first iterations looked like leaves and I also inverted the feathers so they are blocked out with colour. 

For the hatch logo, there was much experimenting with that logo. The initial idea was to put a crack in the ‘a’ so that it looks like an egg. There was a lot of trial and error with the logo but here is the thought process regarding the Hatch logo:

It evolved from having breaks in the ‘a’ to making the ‘a’ a solid colour to making the ‘a’ into an egg shape. Here is the final iteration we went with:

Vectorising the Text

I used Inkscape to vectorise the text. I imported a screenshot of the logos and started tracing them with strokes. By doing this method along with feedback, I realised that this was not the best approach for the typeface. I had a workshop with Marie Nordin about logotypes and the different aspects of typography and it was very informative! Here is a before and after of the Hatch logo when creating it with strokes and then using the Comfortaa base and changing the object to a path and manipulating it that way:

This was the first version of the logo. If you can see closely comparing it to the logo below, there are many imperfections. A big one are the two ‘h’s as in the first version they were not as round as they are in the final version and that was corrected using the actual ‘h’ from the Comfortaa typeface, turning it into a path and cutting out the spaces i needed in the logo. One thing I learned as well is that letters like ‘h’ and ‘n’ have a natural narrowing to them as the curve attaches to the stem which is more pleasing to the eye and I couldn’t really achieve that by using the stroke method. The ‘c’ I created with the stroke was pretty uneven as well so replacing it with Comfortaa’s ‘c’ was a better idea and looks smoother. The ‘t’ was shortened and was made to look more uniform with Nest’s ‘t’ as in the beginning, there were slight things off and they did not match. The ‘a’ was straightened too and more refined.

Here are the final logos and all the other possibilities they could be used in:

Where to next?

These logos have been distributed and you will be able to see them on more projects in the near future! We already used the logo for the Hatch Cork event in Ireland and will use it in the upcoming Nest event! It will be used on all kinds of swag too, especially Colúr! I can’t wait to see where this logo goes and where it will be used!