.NET MAUI Branding ?!?!?

Last weekend our team at H3Y decided to join a virtual design jam. We were brainstorming ideas for a brand or product redesign. We wanted to work on a project in the tech space that we are passionate about and that some of our team members are using in their daily work. Since some of the engineers (including myself) who participated in the design hackathon are working on .NET MAUI based projects, we decided to redesign the .NET MAUI logo together.

App Icon

The current state of the .NET MAUI branding is a bit confusing and inconsistent. The most common logo is just text based .NET on purple background. A good logo should be simple, memorable and universal - typography based logos are usually not considered best practice in branding.

Tooling Icon

There are various other branding elements like the icon within the Visual Studio project dialog, which consits of multiple purple colored squares - this one can be found in the IDE and the installer mostly. We would identify this more as an icon in a tooling context than a logo.

dotnet bot

And of course there is the .NET Bot, which is the official mascot of .NET. This one is used in various places (like .NET Conf marketing) and is available in different variations in 2D and 3D style. The .NET Bot is a beautiful mascot, but it is a bit too complex for a logo - which should be simple and easily recognizable.

With many options to choose from, it can be difficult to know which graphic asset is the right one for a specific use case. As you can see, the current branding is a bit fragmented and there is room for improvement.

Iconography is a very important part of branding and it is important to have a clear and consistent brand identity. Also there are voices from the community, which think that the current branding is not very appealing and a clear brand identity is missing.

A Name and Logo for .NET MAUI · dotnet/maui · Discussion #340

[Enhancement] Logo for Maui · dotnet/maui · Discussion #360

What's Maui's logo? · dotnet/maui · Discussion #5085

Design process

That’s why we decided to redesign the .NET MAUI logo over the weekend. We started by investigating the current state of branding of .NET MAUI and the .NET ecosystem. Since we are developers and community members ourselves, we know where .NET MAUI is coming from and what it is based on, that’s why we also took a close look at Xamarin and its brand identity. In addition to that we investigated the branding of similar technologies like Flutter, React and also some .NET based tech like Uno, Avalonia or Blazor.

We identified some common patterns and also some things we liked and disliked about the current iconography. We began the design process with a simple brainstorming session, where we came up with a few ideas. We then voted on the ideas we liked the most and started to sketch out some proof of concepts, which we also filtered iteratively. After that we started to refine the sketches and finally we created a few digital mockups. We then voted on the versions we liked the most and finally we created a few variations of the logo.

Teaser

Here is a sneak peek of some details of the redesigned logo:

We created a full case study for our approach on how an updated logo for .NET MAUI could look like. You can find the case study website here:

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https://h3y.studio/dotnetmaui

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If you like this work, please share it on the interwebs and let us know what you think. We are also open for feedback and suggestions, so feel free to comment on this post or on the bottom of case study website.