When it’s time to try something new, Murmur is the place where it actually happens.Rainbow-fire vomit, anyone?! 🌈🔥🤮 How fantastic is this miniature?! Featured very briefly on my Stories earlier this week, this has to be one of the best images currently sat on my camera roll. The beauty of working at a SaaS company whose entire promise is built on making decisions, trying them out, then reflecting on them when they expire, is that nothing stays the same for long. Since Murmur hasn’t yet had a consistent blog presence, I haven’t had a chance to test out the sustainability of this design or illustration system I’ve created. While I want to add even more marginalia and reference more paper-like elements, for now, I want to make sure it simply works the way I want it to. But hey, we’re a startup, and if we can’t experiment with our design now, when will we ever do it? A year from now, this blog may look very different. After going through this process, I recognize the limitations of some aspects of my design, at least while building it in a no-code environment - it requires more breakpoints than I would like, and it requires certain text limits to be met for it to look how I’d like it to. I worked with Murmur engineer and Webflow Wizard, Chase, to build our blog in, yes, Webflow. The final design combining the new logo, layout, color palette, and imagery (and fake content in case you were wondering). I designed a few variations but went with a simple version that felt most true to the Murmur logo while still aligning with the visual aesthetic of George’s alphabet. I also chose this as a reference because of the nested M, which I knew I had to include in the Marginalia design. I stayed fairly true to the original design with some modifications for optical sizing. It was based on lettering artwork by Ross F George, who created the breakthrough Speedball ink pen. So, naturally - as anyone with a background in type design is prone to - I designed a custom logo. I initially experimented with Dair for the logo, but Ariel pointed out to me how similar it was to Magnolia. "I wanted to see what I could design with serif fonts that still looked like it was made in 2022, while clearly being an homage to its references." I wanted to see what I could design with serif fonts that still looked like it was made in 2022, while clearly being an homage to its references. This combination spoke best to the postmodern but pre-gradients-digital-brutalism-extended-sans feel I was after. I landed on a combination of Dair by ShinType for headlines and Bely by Roxane Gataud for body text. (At least I think that’s what it is after an entire day of testing all the different Garamond and Garamond-adjacent fonts out there - the condensed width of the capital O made it tricky to figure out.) Either way, I ended up choosing different typefaces for our design for two reasons: it wasn’t readable for long passages of text, and I wasn’t about to straight up copy Pintori - minus, y’know, the layout (but that’s neither here nor there).
The Olivetti booklet, designed in the 1960s by Giovanni Pintori, used Garamond 3 Italic. The first layout exploration inspired by Olivetti. Marginalia is created for many reasons: As a way to make corrections, mark your place in a book, add further commentary, express feelings and thoughts, provide visual examples… or simply just because. They may be scribbles, comments, glosses, critiques, doodles, drolleries, or illuminations.” Most examples I came across were found in illuminated manuscripts (also see, Medieval Marginalia) or notes written in the margins of books. Marginalia is defined as “marks made in the margins of a book or other document. She had originally pitched that as the name of interactions in Murmur - and it felt like a sign. I shared the idea with Ariel, and she told me that there was actually a word for that: Marginalia. I knew it wasn’t quite there, but I sensed that I was on the cusp of something that felt right. But I found myself most drawn to this idea of “Notes in the Margin”. Most of them were unusable - pretentious, far too abstract, or just plain terrible (eg. I started brainstorming names for our blog around the themes of paper and writing. Marginalia evolved from a few different ideas. We wanted to incorporate paper-related elements (inspired by Murmur’s paper characters).We wanted to be visually distinct from other blogs, but not just through illustration.We wanted the blog to feel more editorial compared to traditional tech blogs.We had three goals throughout the previous (failed) blog redesigns: (Three!) I’ve put countless designs in front of Aaron and Ariel, and even though they were my own, none of the designs ever felt “right”. In the two years I’ve spent working on brand design at Murmur, I’ve approached redesigning our blog three separate times.
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