Our logo is our face

Naughty Pixel

Some years ago, while I was still in design school, I had this project in which I had to create the logo and all the stationary for my future company. I remember thinking I would like to do Web Design and Multimedia stuff. At that point the “naughty pixel” was born.

This logo featured a winking smiley face, tilted. The idea was to give it a friendly “come and play” look.

Years later, VGS was born and while struggling to find the perfect image to represent our vision, we knew we needed a character.

Tests with Vlad's toon

“Vortix” was the name of a character Ricardo was always drawing on any random piece of paper. The idea of a devilish character was appealing, but once reduced to smaller sizes the features and fur were lost, turning it into a blob with eyes. That’s when the naughty pixel was rescued from a dusty desk drawer and brought back to life.

Our first logos

The corners where rounded to remove the harshness of the sharp outline, the wink was removed to make the face clearer and the nose removed for simplicity. This left us with a friendly face but all it did was smile. A couple of months after we settled on the new not-so-naughty-anymore pixel we gave it a small face-lift to help him stand out a bit more as a real thing, instead of just a shape. By adding the tongue we gave it a certain “determination” or “defiance” to it that, while keeping the smile, makes it look like the little pixel is really focused on playing. We also un-tilted it for better use in smaller formats such as icons and avatars.

Final tests and logos

We’re pretty happy with the result!