the brief
The Cooler is a network for founders and independent people building their own thing.
Working for yourself gives you freedom, but it also removes a lot of the small social moments that come with having coworkers.
The brief was to build an identity around that missing part of work. A place to meet people you can relate to, talk things through with, grab coffee with, and keep seeing over time.
Not another networking platform. Not another chat app.
the challenge
My first instinct was to focus on conversation. I explored speech bubbles, connected letters, two O’s behaving like people talking, and a C acting almost like a shared space.
The ideas made sense, but the more literal they became, the more the identity started looking like a messaging product.
So I moved away from showing conversation itself and started focusing on the people having it.
the result
The final identity is built around one idea: likeminded, not identical.
The Cooler is about finding people you can relate to. Different backgrounds, different work, different personalities, but enough shared experience to recognize something familiar in each other.
I translated that into the wordmark by giving the letterforms the same visual DNA without making them exact copies.
Different shapes. Same family.
LIKEMINDED PEOPLE
The idea came from that feeling of meeting someone different from you and still thinking, yeah, you get it.
The people inside The Cooler do not need to look alike, work alike, or think alike to feel familiar to each other.
The letterforms work the same way. The C and O’s share related curves, weight, softness, and rhythm, so they feel connected while still keeping their own shape.
The idea was never to make them match. It was to make them feel like they relate.
The Wordmark
The first developed version pushed that relationship quite far, with the C and O’s built from very similar open forms. The client liked the direction, but pointed out that the O’s were reading too much like C’s.
That became the next problem to solve.
I explored different O constructions, adjusting how closed they were, how they connected to the surrounding letters, and how much of the original rhythm they retained. The final version keeps the same softness, weight, and family resemblance, but makes the O’s clearly readable.
The Logomark
The C is my favorite part. It was drawn from the beginning to work as more than just a letter. Its shape was built so that, when turned 90 degrees, it becomes a speech bubble.
That gave the logomark a direct connection to one of the core ideas behind The Cooler: conversation.
It still feels like part of the wordmark, but it can also stand on its own as a compact symbol across the app, social profiles, favicons, and smaller brand moments.
A square version was also created for places where the mark needed a more contained digital footprint.
Custom typeface
I also created a custom handwritten typeface designed to act like a third voice inside the system.
It appears in short comments, annotations, arrows, doodles, corrections, and little interruptions throughout the identity. Rather than using it as another headline font, I treated it more like someone scribbling in the margins of the brand.
That gave the system a more conversational layer and made room for the dry, reactive humor that runs through The Cooler without forcing every headline to carry the personality on its own.
