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New logo for Cake DeFi rebrand

for Cake DeFi

I’ve been busy working with various startup in the five years since my last post. I joined Cake DeFi in 2019, after being hired by one of its co-founders to lead the design effort. Lots have happened since, which I will talk about in future posts. I’d like to share an interesting project that I recently completed – to redesign its logo, as part of a larger brand identity refresh we did in collaboration with Aleph Labs.

Also widely known by its community as Cake, Cake DeFi is a startup in the cryptocurrency/blockchain/fintech space founded in 2019 by Dr Julian Hosp and U-Zyn Chua. Cake aims to help its users shape their financial destiny by bringing to their users easy access to decentralized finance – DeFi. An important part of this is bridging the wild west of crypto and people curious about the income potential of cryptocurrencies, through a great user experience.

Growing up

I joined the company in the start of the previous bull market, and witnessed its mad growth during the bull run where we were on the verge of going public, to the slowdown in the recent recession. Over this period, Cake underwent the beginning of its growing-up phase, and needed the world to know that it has entered its adolescence phase where how it carried itself and how it marketed its products was now as important as how it built them. This meant new brand expression, new website, new voice, new many things. To help us craft this new identity, the Marketing and Brand team enlisted the help of Aleph Labs, who worked closely with our internal stakeholders and designers to create a brand new look, while keeping core elements intact.

One thing we decided early in the project was that we will not touch the logo, as we believed it could still work and we would focus attention on everything else around the logo. No one yet was bold enough enough to suggest that we should redesign the old logo. So we ignored it and tried to fit the new brand around the old logo. The old logo was originally done by a designer at Cake before I joined. I made some shape refinements in 2020. As a creative, I would have loved to work on it, to give it my soul. But I agreed that it may not be the right time.

The old logo still visible in this tweet

Around a month before the rebrand was due to released to the world, we all had a nagging feeling that the old logo has really aged and no longer represent who we are. So we decided to take a stab at redesigning the logo ourselves. And I was tasked to do it.