A few weeks ago my brother Eduardo Sasso showed me an idea he had for a web service that would be perfect for those who travel a lot or simply want to keep track of their adventures when they are away from their places. I loved the concept and I joined him along side with Gisele Muller and Fabiano Meneghetti to make that app become real. The name was already chosen, Mentaway.

Talking to my brother and Gisele, the creators of the whole idea, they gave me some insights on how they see the service, the goals and philosophy behind it. My role would be come up with the design.

The first thing I did was list some keywords:

• Traveling
• Map
• Route
• Compass
• Direction
• Away
• Pinpoint

I started looking for compass, map and direction images. I collected quite a few images and got some ideas already in my mind.

First concept: Lettering and Arrow.

The first concept I explored was using an arrow in the lettering. Similar to the Fedex concept but using the A and the Y.

After sketching I went to the computer and tried to come up with something based on those ideas. It turned out that it wasn’t a very solid concept, it was hard to apply it in the lettering especially because the A and Y would have to be aligned in a way in order to make the arrow visible. Plus I thought it didn’t have personality and uniqueness. The Mentaway logo had to be something with a symbol in my point of view.

Second concept: Compass and direction sign

Time for the plan b, I checked the images I had selected and decided to explore the compass element. I also liked the idea of those direction signs, it is pretty much what the service is all about. Then back to some more sketching.... I know I sucked at that.

I wanted to use the compass but not exactly the same representation, so I created a 3 point compass only. After that I noticed that playing with negative spaces I could make that symbol looks like a direction sign as well. So here is what the symbol is all about.

With the symbol pretty much done it was time to choose the typeface and colors. In my point of view a good logo is that one that can be very recognizable in either color or back and white. Below you can see the logo in black over white background and vice-versa.

For the colors the goal was to make it super friendly and also a bit colorful, like when you travel and you get a map of the subway or train they always have the different colors for the routes. With that in mind we chose 3 colors for the 3 main directions, Blue, Yellow and Red, but less saturated hues.

The typeface is always something that always takes a lot of time looking for and testing. Below you can see some of the fonts I tested.

The final concept. I am still working on the logo, especially adjusting the proportion and sizes, the best way to do that is by optical adjustments using a grid. But as we needed to release the splash as soon as possible I completed the final concept with two variations, vertical and horizontal.

For more information about Mentaway visit http://mentaway.com