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Shivelight Logo Design

An illuminating branding experience

Brand Identity

Shivelight is a Seattle-based company that takes the stress out of IT for small businesses, providing managed services and custom support to help clients work more efficiently and keep their systems secure.

After experiencing solid growth over the last couple of years, the company had outgrown its brand identity—Shivelight needed visual credibility to match its tech expertise and high level of service.

Company owner and co-founder Mahlon Otero has known Josh and the Chalkbox team since 2020, so when we launched this project he was familiar with our process and work. We were familiar with Shivelight, too, because Chalkbox is a client.

Chalkbox portfolio hero foreground Shivelight

Trees, trees, and more trees

During our research, we found that Shivelight’s competition has branding that varies widely in quality; compared to other fields, tech-related businesses often place more importance on design, so the good stuff was pretty good. We needed to elevate Shivelight visually so it looks like it belongs in the upper echelon of IT firms.

We also faced a unique challenge: incorporating a tree into the identity, but at the same time, not being too obvious about it. “Shivelight” refers to the light that streams through trees in a forest (no, we didn’t know this, either), so it needed to play some role in the Shivelight logo.

But the business landscape in Seattle is saturated with trees, in any and all fields. Need a plumber? Tree logo. Want to buy some yarn? Tree logo with knitting needle. Booking a hotel? You might even see two trees. We had to find a way to make Shivelight’s tree—whatever form it took—stand out among the forest of other tree logos.

Chalkbox portfolio logo standard Shivelight
Chalkbox portfolio logo reverse Shivelight

Refined, yet accessible and relevant

We shared our ideas openly with Mahlon and his wife (company co-founder Alison), sketching and then working together to move the right ideas forward. One of Shivelight’s key differentiators is the team’s ability to explain the mysteries of IT with plain language and patience (we can personally attest to this). The brand identity needed to reflect that, projecting expertise and knowledge while remaining approachable for regular people using complicated technology.

The final mark incorporates a stylized tree with angled beams of light flowing through it, paired with a semi-condensed, rounded typeface. It feels familiar, yet a touch futuristic—clearly rooted in the technology space, but like the people at Shivelight, open and friendly.

Chalkbox portfolio color type Shivelight
‘‘We couldn’t be happier’’

“Our old logo was decent, but it didn’t reflect where we are now as a business,” Mahlon says. “Chalkbox worked closely with us to create something that truly elevates Shivelight, with a look and feel that will resonate with our audience. We couldn’t be happier—the new logo is perfect.”

Is your brand rooted in the past?

Branding is more than just a logo; it is an introduction to the experience you provide. And if it’s outdated, it can send people the wrong message about your business. Chalkbox will help make sure your first impression is a great one. Start the conversation today!
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Like typefaces? So do we!

On this website we use Open Sans for body copy, menus, and buttons. For headings, and our boiler plate message we use Bitter. Both are Google fonts available here. We chose these typefaces because they pair well with the typeface we use in our logo, Gotham. Gotham is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000. Open Sans and Bitter pair well with Gotham (in our opinion) thanks to a balance of contrast in the slab-serifs found in Bitter, and similarities in the geometric finish of those slab-serifs along with similar x-height and counter shape in both Open Sans and Bitter.

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