A panda hidden in the system
How our logo came to be, a cloud of connected dots where a panda appears if you look closely.
At first glance our logo looks like a 3D plot: hundreds of dots wired together like a neural network or a topographic map. Look a little longer and the dots in the middle darken, link up, and a panda’s face appears.
The idea
We tried many routes before landing here: a panda with a bamboo leaf for an ear, one built from code brackets, another made of pixels. They were all friendly, but none of them told the story we wanted to tell.
The final idea was this: PandaLabs is hidden in the system. In the cables, in the foundations, in the DNA of what we build. Like a watermark. You don’t need to see it for it to be there, but once you find it you can’t stop seeing it.
Four states
The same drawing lives in four versions:
- System: the panda is fully hidden. We use it as texture.
- Watermark: the panda is barely there. For splash screens and “made by PandaLabs” stamps.
- Revealed: the main logo.
- On dark: the panda keeps its natural colours, white face and black patches, on dark grounds.
The animation
On the home page the logo loads as the system and, after a moment, the panda appears from the centre outward, in eight rings. It’s the only showy motion on the site. If your device asks for reduced motion, we show you the panda straight away.
Nerdy detail: every dot in the drawing is computed by a small program that projects a 3D surface. Not a single dot was placed by hand.