Catbox Unveiled
Where creativity finds its home: the logo that welcomes all.
Building the Scatter House
Scatter’s “Artist-first launchpad” masthead remains a banner proudly waved, perhaps now with more pride than ever. Where the VC-funded NFT platforms have found themselves weathered and beaten beneath relentless squall of a turbulent crypto landscape, Scatter has thrived thanks to the dedication of our team and the passion of the creators and collectors who visit Scatter every day. Through passionate celebration and careful cultivation of our vibrant coterie of creators and digital natives, we’ve graciously had opportunity to not just be of service to the future of digital art, but to provide a home for them in a way nobody else can.
The blossoming of the Scatter ménage is worthy of celebration, but let’s not stop there. Rather, we feel it’s high time the beacon burned brighter than ever, delivering an invitation of welcome to all who seek the possibility and promise provided by the Scatter household.
“And what symbol shall we rally to?” you ask. Well, we’re proud to announce the mark of our covenant with the pioneers of the future of digital art, and the new mark of the Scatter.art brand:
Scatter means many things to many people, and the genuinely diverse members of our household mean a great many things to us. Let us walk you through some of our journey in arriving at the iconic Scatter ‘Catbox’.
What Does Scatter Mean?
With such a vibrant collective of creators living under the Scatter roof, how could we possibly capture them all with a single mark? Branding is no light exercise. Where at the end of the process we see only a single mark, the audience is spared the agonising introspection required to extract the final distillation. Our meditations on Scatter yielded common threads - emerging as pillars of Scatter - that we feel you’ll agree capture what it is to call Scatter home:
- Fun
- No matter where you look on Scatter, you’ll always find fun being had. The more you look, the easier it becomes to suspect that fun isn’t just a part of creating with Scatter, but actually the main impetus. Scatter creators create with a smile on their face, and they don’t grind, they thrive.
- Imagination
- One great privilege of bearing witness to the unique brand of creativity endemic to the Scatter community is the ability to always see creators ‘at play’. Scatter creators are artists at play in a way that just doesn’t happen on the sterile factory floors of other platforms. With every new collections comes a new boundary being pushed, the birth of a new cultural capstone, a wholly new addition to the zeitgeist.
- Home
- As already thoroughly alluded to, what makes Scatter special beyond the grasp of any other platform is that we all call Scatter home, and home is special - it is categorically not fungible.
- When we consider what a home symbolizes, we think of warmth, security, growth, and an unbreakable bond of unity. At Scatter, we are painstakingly crafting our platform to encapsulate this essence. Just as each home is a unique sanctuary for its inhabitants, Scatter provides a digital domain where every creator can carve out their niche, feeling a genuine sense of belonging.
- Scatter is more than just another platform; it’s a space where creators can unabashedly express themselves, safe from judgment and with the confidence that their content is respected and protected.
- Scatter stands as a pillar of continuous encouragement for its creators. We offer tools, community initiatives, and features that not only uplift the creativity of our users but also fortify their endeavors.
- Scatter serves as a foundation where creators can evolve, experiment, and expand their horizons.
- Community and connection form the lifeblood of any home. Our platform isn't solely about individual creation; it’s about forming bonds, fostering collaborations, and building collectively. This alchemy of individual creativity and community spirit is what makes Scatter a thriving digital ecosystem.
- As the digital world evolves, so does Scatter, ensuring that our creators always have the tools and environment they need. We have our finger on the pulse, and have a vision for what's to come that we are working hard to realize... together with you!
- Much like the comforting embrace of a home that we return to time and again, creators find themselves gravitating back to Scatter — a constant in their digital journey, be it for inspiration, collaboration, or... gaming!
It's evident that Scatter isn’t just a platform — it’s a home, a community, and a testament to the power of collective creativity.
Brand Requirements
Above all else, our mission was to capture the themes above as a means of inviting any and all who resonate with them to join the Scatter family. But there’s more to modern branding than just passing the vibe check.
Other than the web-first tech industry branding playbook calling for clear, minimal brand marks, flat colorways and a sharp silhouette, the Scatter logo has a few extra hoops to jump through.
Firstly, we need an icon that can be dropped into any context and still hold up loud and clear. The simple reason for this is that Scatter, other than working with a sprawling zoo of wildly different creators, is increasingly active in developing tooling that powers the bleeding edge of web3 and NFT technology. As such, we can expect to see our friendly Catbox appearing in many surprising situations.
Secondly, we also don’t feel that a typical abstract geometric logo - nor even a more typographically driven mark - would serve our goals here. Given the pillar of Scatter identified above, we recognise that whatever speaks on behalf of Scatter needs, above all else, character. Sure, we want our symbol to look the part, but we need to be having fun too.
And finally, whatever we choose to represent ourselves with shouldn’t be too prescriptive. It hardly needs mentioning again, but there is a rather massive range of creative expression with the people in the Scatter tribe, so whatever we choose to represent them should employ a liberal amount of leeway that our collective imaginations can all have a bit of resonance with.
The Process
We’ll spare you a granular step-through of the many hundreds of ideas and revisions that were iterated throughout this process - and indeed they were many, and many were so beloved that it was a heartbreak to leave them on the table -, and mention just some of the milestone moments in this journey.
Initially the first symbol that stood out as a serious contender was that of the flower. There’s a certain self-evident poetry to the flower as a symbol. We all automatically recognise them as symbols of objective natural beauty, thus lending to a connection to art and creativity, and more pertinently they come in a great multitude of shapes and colours, all of which are profoundly beautiful in unique ways.
Thinking along these lines, it makes sense that the flower would emerge as a simple choice given our requirements, but that was only until The Cat appeared.
Whilst the flower idea just seemed to organically present itself, as if emerging from the ether to help us complete our task, the cat rather was explicitly suggested multiple times during brainstorming. Despite this, the cat wasn’t immediately pursued as a big contender, the flower just had too much potential.
Things changed fast after a single light-bulb moment however - the image of a cat playing in a box. The second this image presented itself everything seemed to fell into place - our need to exude fun, and imagination, our desire to represent ourselves as a home to everyone yearning for these two things… it all suddenly made so much sense.
What made the cat + box concept so powerful is it combines the art of being ‘at play’ with a profoundly modern symbol of limitless imagination: an empty cardboard box.
The Scatter Catbox
And thus, we arrived at the crystallisation of all that is Scatter - the ‘Catbox’. As anyone who has ever suffered through the arduous labours of logo design knows however, the right idea is only half the battle. The final part of the riddle is resolving the idea in a way that solidifies all communicative objectives as simply, elegantly, and effortlessly as possible.
The capstone in the monument to Scatter that is the ‘Catbox’ is its silhouette: that of a house. Whilst close inspection reveals rather unambiguously a catlike creature enjoy the comforts of an open (presumably cardboard) box, at a glance the pert tail and folded sides of the box give the brief impression of a house with a chimney and eaves, or perhaps a shopfront.
