I created this logo and brand identity for HEVM as part of Octant's Epoch 8 Design for Ethereum competition. The challenge was to give any of the seven Ethereum infrastructure projects a visual upgrade. These are projects that are critical to the ecosystem but didn't have polished branding yet.
HEVM is an open-source symbolic execution engine for the Ethereum Virtual Machine, used by developers to find bugs in smart contracts and formally verify their correctness. It needed an identity that would communicate technical credibility while standing out in the crowded Ethereum tooling space.
Visual identity that feels at home in the Ethereum developer ecosystem: technical, trustworthy, and built for people who write code.
Logo Concept
The logo is built around the turnstile symbol (⊢), a fundamental notation in formal logic and type theory that means "proves" or "entails." I chose this symbol because it's core to what HEVM does on multiple levels: it appears constantly in Haskell's type system notation and HEVM is in the business of proving properties about smart contracts through symbolic execution.
The logo integrates the turnstile directly into the letter H, visually saying "Haskell proves (properties about the) Ethereum Virtual Machine." It's a bit of a wink to formal methods folks who'll recognize the symbol immediately, while still working as a clean, modern logo for everyone else. I kept the design geometric and structured with monospaced letterforms that echo the fixed-width fonts developers work with daily.
Color Palette
I kept the color system is intentionally minimal and developer-focused. Electric Blue serves as the primary brand accent: vibrant without being distracting, technical without being cold. Pure Black handles the primary wordmark and conveys the authority and precision appropriate for a tool that prevents smart contract vulnerabilities.
Light Gray provides breathing room for documentation and web interfaces. The palette works in both light and dark modes, which matters when your audience lives in dark-themed IDEs and terminals.
Apparel and Merch
The minimal aesthetic translates well to physical merchandise. The logo stays legible whether embroidered on a cap or printed on a water bottle, maintaining its technical precision across different materials and applications.
Logo that works just as well on a hoodie as it does in GitHub documentation.
