Originally posted in CSS Design Awards’ Blog.

A word of warning, the story of how we came up with the name for Indicius is not a very conventional one. In fact, it is quite weird, but I believe even the strangest version of a brand’s birth has a message to convey.

I have friends, good friends, and they have always been a source of inspiration. As is the case amongst most friends, we have our own casual dialect. We’ve invented so many words that we even have a small, funny dictionary. And we update it, adding new slang every year. So why am I telling you all this? Well, our brand name for Indicius actually came from using one of those words.

Let me explain. In Spanish, the word “indicio” refers to a sign, hint, or indirect suggestion. In our case, we used it to suggest that something was going to happen. While hanging out, during a meeting or in the middle of a conversation, when somebody said “indicios” it was because something was approaching. I liked that. I liked the idea of communicating that something exceptional could happen. And because it was within a group of friends, well, we’d always expect something nice to happen. Something cool, positive, and wonderful.

So “Indicius” derives from “indicios”, but how we got there is not the most important part of this story.

I started this business in 2004 and for eight long years, my web department was just a small area in an existing Architecture and 3D Animation studio. We started growing and by 2012 we decided to become a fully-fledged creative digital agency. A new name and branding process was now needed. So I shared a list with several names amongst my contacts and other people in the business. Of all the great ideas, “Indicius” was my favorite, and I was happy to confirm that most of the people agreed. We had a winner!

One of our most talented designers then came up with the ‘i’ concept, which I liked a lot. It reminded me of the “Keep Walking” from Johnny Walker’s logo. The “i” was moving forward, it wasn’t static, and that’s what I wanted for my agency.

In hindsight, the process may have been a little amateurish and incomplete. For example, we didn’t create a brand manual back then and the color palette was incomplete. Amazingly the cyan as it is today (so important for our brand now) was not even part of the color palette back then.

Three years later, in 2015, we went through a full process to define all the brand elements. New colors were then added to produce the final palette.

Our brand. Our name. It took us some time, but now it flows and we all have a special feeling towards it. And that’s not just because of the “i”, or the name, or the colors. It is because of the awesome people and work culture behind the brand.