Introducing little unknown

Every app I’ve shipped started the same way. Something bothered me, I didn’t know the answer, and the only way to find out was to build it. From now on, that work has a name: little unknown.

The name

Most products start as a small question that nobody has answered well yet. I call those little unknowns. Finding one is the first step. Building it, shipping it and making it good is the rest of the job.

The logo

The mark is a band of eighteen dots. The dark ones are everything that’s already known. Three of them are lit in vermilion, and those are the little unknowns.

Next to the dots, the word “unknown” is set large. It’s mostly short letters, so there’s empty space above the “un”. The word “little” sits in exactly that space, so the small word fits inside the big one. That was the moment the logo clicked for me.

You can watch it build itself, and download the files, on the brand page.

What’s here

The first product under the name is Calm Chess, a chess app with a coach that explains every move. It’s coming to the App Store and Google Play, and I’ve written about it in the next post.

New work will show up on the home page, and posts like this one will go here. There’s an RSS feed if you’d like to follow along.