Bopsmith had a name and a domain but only the old favicon for a face. The logo went through three rounds in one day, each published as a preview page on dark and light backgrounds and at small sizes.
The rounds
Round one offered four directions: a pad grid, an anvil, a lit pad, and a four-cell grid. The owner liked the pad grid and the four-cell. Round two refined both and added a hybrid that put the instrument shapes inside the grid. The owner was torn between the hybrid and the two pad grids, and chose the hybrid as the primary mark with the first pad grid as the one-colour fallback.
Why the hybrid
It keeps the pad grid people already knew from the old favicon and adds the four instruments the app is built around. Because each instrument has a shape as well as a colour, the mark still reads for colour-blind viewers. The fallback exists because the hybrid’s cut-outs lose their meaning in a single ink, while the pad grid, two pads solid and two as rings, was drawn for one.
The details
The logo colours are darker cousins of the app’s interface hues, tuned to hold contrast on both the dark and the light background, with a rule not to swap the interface hues back in. The wordmark is converted to outlines so no file depends on the font. For browser tabs, the mark is redrawn on a thirty-two unit grid so every edge lands on a whole pixel, with the cut-outs simplified: at sixteen pixels colour does the work, at thirty-two every shape reads. The app icons are generated by a script that draws the mark from shapes rather than tracing a file, and the exploration files were deleted once the final was in.