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Raphael Sigg
March 10, 2018
4 min read
Our focus has changed over the years. That’s not a bad thing. The world changes, people change, and so do companies. Rentouch is (fortunately) no exception in this respect. We knew early on that we would not be successful in the hardware business in the long term. A Swiss company that manufactures touchscreens in Switzerland would never be able to win the price war. The touchscreens were always just a means to an end — so to speak “enablers for our software”. In 2015, it turned out that our many years of experience in developing intuitive software for large touchscreens could solve real big problems. The problem of teamwork in distributed constellations. In mid-2016 we tweeted a short video of a real-time synchronized SAFe® Program Board. The tweet was a huge success and we were swamped with requests. It quickly became clear that the piplanning app will play an important role in our product line.
Our mission had remained the same over the years:
We eliminate barriers in distributed team collaboration.
Much had changed over the years. But not our logo. Our logo was so simple and timelessly beautiful that it fit for every phase that Rentouch went through.
In the beginning, when Rentouch was more of a project than a company, our logo was just an image that we could use for the website or print on our marketing material. It had no special meaning. The only characteristic was the two-part T. A logo alone does not matter. Only what one makes of the company defines the character of the name and the logo. We have always been aware of that. Therefore we were also very satisfied with our simple logo, which didn’t have to be changed very much in order to be used over the years for a wide variety of products. However, as our mission has not changed in the last few years and we also wanted to remain on course with the development of the piplanning app, we wanted to express this in our logo.
We knew we wanted a logo that reflects why we exist, what values we stand for, what we believe in and where we want to go. At first we started from our vision.
VISION — It doesn’t matter where people are physically located. They can meet with everyone in a virtual room. Plan together with others on large virtual walls and even feel the paper. Conversations can be conducted naturally as if they were facing each other in real life.
We tried to visualize the meaning of our vision in a logo.
But it wasn’t easy. So we decided to look at it from a different angle. We tried to find the origin of the problem in history. We came across the story of the tower of Babel. It is a biblical story, but the symbolism embodied exactly the problem we solve.
The story goes like this:
Mankind once spoke the same language was unified and agreed to start a massive construction project. A tower that was supposed to rise into the sky. Since everything would have been possible under these conditions, their tongues were confused and they were scattered all over the world.
All important factors were included. The tower symbolizes a large product or system that requires the cooperation of many people with different skills. The many people who work on it embody the company behind the development. Somehow people are scattered all over the world, so they suddenly have to deal with distributed teams. They have to wait hundreds of years until the technology is advanced enough to resume the work of such large-scale products or systems.
In regards to our logo the answer was the tower from a bird’s eye view.
Also check out the video we made: