The Radical trolls and our new logo

About ten years ago, when we officially founded Radical Elements, we were uncomfortable with self-promo and tooting our own horns. Putting our faces on a website, talking about how awesome we were, not really our thing. A decade later, nothing’s changed. Consistency, right?

Back then, while building our first website, we did what every developer does. We filled the work-in-progress with nonsense, and the best example was the "Who we are" page. Instead of our portraits, we used troll photos as placeholders.

But they couldn’t be just any trolls. They had to match our characters, look good, they had to be art. That’s how we stumbled onto Olivier Silven’s sketches on Behance. They were so beautifully ugly. Perfect.

I even cropped them into avatars and even played with our logo so the trolls looked like they were breaking out of prison bars.

When launch time came, we were supposed to replace them with our actual photos. But we couldn’t do it. We’d grown attached. So we adopted the trolls, contacted Olivier, and he generously let us keep them, as long as we accredited him.

The trolls stayed with us. They even became part of our 404 page.

Over the years, they were always an icebreaker. New clients would check out the website before meeting us and would mention them right away. Some said the trolls convinced them they wanted to work with us. Others just laughed. Either way, it worked.

Fast forward to now. After years of working on big, closed projects, it was finally time to re-enter the market. The old site had served us well, but it felt ancient. We needed something new.

We struggled with a logo for months. Nothing fit. Then Alexandros said it: what’s the one thing people always associate with Radical Elements? The trolls. That was it. Finally something clicked. And who better to design our new logo than Olivier himself?

We reached out again, ten years later. He said yes. He worked lightning fast, turned our vague ideas into exactly what we wanted, and we made only the tiniest tweaks. The new Radical Elements logo was born, true to our history, consistent with our aesthetics, carrying our ridiculous little legacy into the future.

Olivier was fantastic to work with. Quick, responsive, and somehow inside our heads. You can see more of his work on his Behance and Tumblr pages.

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PS: A few days ago, I was deep in bug-solving mode at my home office, frustrated. My partner came in and decided to mess with me by licking my cheek, which always infuriates me. I started banging my fists on the desk, exactly like our troll in the logo. He pointed at me, thrilled and laughing, and yelled: “That’s where it comes from! You are your logo!”

Apparently we’ve taken brand identity a bit too literally.