A friend established a company focused on simplifying web technologies to small businesses. Technology is a bit intimidating to his customers, so he was effectively giving them their coffee, but without the jitters. He already has a mark, but I wanted to explore some icon marks based on the concept of coffee + technology.
This is one of my preferred results.
One angle was to go with a pixel-styled mug, which I did play around with at one point (more on that below). But the main direction I went with was the circuits-as-steam path. There are a ton of directions you can take circuits, as far as their angles go, so the main challenge was in identifying the variation that best mixture of circuit-steam density (how many steam trails), natural-steam-movement, and circuit-layout. The option above was probably my favorite of the mix.
15 variations of the icon.
Prior to exploring these marks, I had supplied my friend with a wireframe layout for his landing page. On this wire, I briefly played around with the pixel-coffee-mug-option. It's simple, and pretty friendly, but probably a tad bit too generic.
