First steps
How many lawyers does it take to design a logo?
Picture this - it’s 2021, both Ian and Alex have left the Legal Service. Ian is working as a lawyer with Dentons Rodyk & Davidson1, and Alex has just started teaching at Singapore University of Social Sciences2.
We knew that we wanted to build something together, but it wasn’t clear to us exactly how we could go about building it. Neither of us had the experience, resources, or contacts necessary to dive into a start-up. And we both had full-time jobs.
So, we decided (in retrospect somewhat naively), that we’d just bootstrap the whole thing on the side. Ian had taught himself coding during his time at the Legal Technology and Innovation Office, and Alex had learnt a bit about UI/UX design during his stint at the Office of Transformation and Innovation, Supreme Court of Singapore (in the legal profession, we do like entity names long). Therefore, while Ian began to code the back-end, Alex mocked up some of the front-end stuff.
This approach had severe limitations, and we rapidly found that working on Elefant part-time was, well, not working. A product like this needs the attention and level of skill that only full-time commitment can provide. But anyway, we thought you might enjoy some of the early, fumbling steps we took into this product.
Here’s the first attempt Alex made at designing a logo for Elefant on Canva. At the time, we didn’t know the “Elephant” domain name was taken, so we hadn’t yet gone for “Elefant”.
Remember how we said Elefant started out as a sentencing tool? Well, here is the first iteration of Elefant’s initial concept.
We then pivoted to legal search, and here you see the revised home page, which has been simplified to reflect the new focus.
It should be apparent that we’ve come a long, long way since then. In 2023, Ian decided to go full time on Elefant. We applied for, and successfully got into, Singapore Management University’s BIG incubator program. With a small grant and a bit of our own money, we could finally hire some professional help. Ian began coding at a furious pace, and we engaged some freelancers to help with both the back-end and front-end work. The results speak for themselves, we think!
P.S. The answer to the subtitle is 0: we commissioned a graphic designer for our logo, which we’ve come to love.
A storied Singapore firm founded in 1861, that has since merged with the global firm, Dentons.
Singapore’s newest public autonomous university, which focuses on applied degree programmes in the social sciences (thanks Wikipedia!)
 |
|