A company before a product.

Autodesk was started by a group of programmers rather than around a single idea. Wikipedia says the company was founded in April 1982 by John Walker, Daniel Drake and other programmers. The founders were unsure which area of software to pursue, Wikipedia says, so they set up the company and planned several different applications to see which would succeed.

The one that did had come from outside. Wikipedia says Walker acquired Interact, a computer-aided design program written by Michael Riddle in 1979, which ran on microcomputers using the CP/M operating system and on two newer machines, the Victor 9000 and the IBM Personal Computer. Riddle had struggled to sell the program and agreed to let Walker have it in exchange for royalties. It was developed further and renamed AutoCAD.

The company’s direction was settled at a trade show. Wikipedia says AutoCAD was shown at Comdex in Las Vegas in 1982, next to a text editor that was the company’s other product there; the public reaction to the drawing program, and the lack of interest in the editor, led the company to concentrate on computer-aided design. AutoCAD went on sale in December 1982. Its purpose, Wikipedia says, was to make detailed technical drawing affordable for smaller design, engineering and architecture firms working on personal computers.

The product name and the company name grew up together. Wikipedia says that for a while Autodesk implied that AutoCAD was the company’s name, and that the company still saw itself as a general software maker until Carol Bartz, as chief executive, ended diversification outside computer-aided design in the early 1990s. Autodesk became a public company in 1985. In 1986, according to Wikipedia, AutoCAD Release 2.1 added AutoLISP, a built-in programming language that let outside developers extend the program for particular trades, and AutoCAD’s native file formats, DWG and DXF, came to be used for exchanging drawing data between programs. Walker stayed on as a programmer at the company until 1994.

From a 2013 mark to a machine part.

The company’s logos have followed its changing idea of itself. Wikipedia says Autodesk introduced a new logo at the TED conference in Long Beach, California, on 26 February 2013. That mark was replaced eight years later. CG Channel, the computer-graphics news site, reported on 8 September 2021 that Autodesk had rolled out a new brand system, including a new company logo, a new corporate font, brand colours and design guidelines for websites, marketing material and merchandise.

The wordmark changed only a little. CG Channel wrote that the new logotype was still set in all sans-serif capitals, though in a bolder font. The larger change was the symbol: the Autodesk “A” became a semi-abstract logomark which, in an animation on the company’s branding microsite, was revealed to be the plan view of a stylised 3D mechanical part. Autodesk described the result as “a strong simple logo that illustrates a brand synonymous with doing”, CG Channel reported, and presented the change as one of several moves to reimagine the brand.

Type and colour were redrawn at the same time. The system introduced a corporate typeface, Artifakt, which CG Channel said was created by the type designer Erik Spiekermann of the studio Edenspiekermann, and which was put to work in headings on the company’s homepage. The old Autodesk blue was replaced by black, white, two shades of grey and four accent colours, named clay, plant, iris and gold. At the time of the report the new system had reached the homepage, while individual product pages kept the older colours and typography.

The product brands followed. CG Channel noted in September 2021 that the logos of individual products, such as 3ds Max and Maya, had not yet changed. In an update dated 5 March 2022, it reported that Autodesk had rolled out new product logos for its media and entertainment software, timed to the 2023 releases of 3ds Max, Maya, MotionBuilder and Mudbox, with Flame also shown in the new style.

Icons, wordmarks and screens.

Design software carries its identity on surfaces that most brands never have to think about. The first is the app icon: a square of a few hundred pixels that sits in a dock, a taskbar or a launcher beside dozens of others, and that has to be recognisable at a size smaller than a fingernail. Icons for creative tools are often redrawn when an operating system changes its visual language, so a single program can accumulate several generations of icon over its life.

The second surface is the splash screen or start window, the image that appears while the program loads. For many users it is the moment they see the product name at full size, and it is frequently refreshed with each major release.

A third surface is the file format. A document extension appears in file names, in email attachments and in folder listings, and a distinct document icon lets a user spot a working file among exports. The extension often outlives the interface around it.

Finally, release names and version numbers act as a kind of sub-brand. A numbered release, a year-based name or a renamed edition tells users which generation of the tool they have, and the way a developer numbers its versions becomes part of how the product is talked about.

Many names under one roof.

Many of the names inside Autodesk began elsewhere. The post-production news site Post Magazine noted on 5 October 2005 that Autodesk had acquired Discreet in 1999, gaining tools for 3D animation, visual effects, compositing and editing. The same report covered Autodesk’s plan to acquire Alias, the Toronto company founded as Alias Research in 1983, whose products included the 3D application Maya, the character animation program MotionBuilder and the 3D exchange format FBX. TV Technology, on 7 October 2005, described Autodesk as based in San Rafael, California, and said Maya and FBX would join its film, video and games lines. Wikipedia records the purchase of Revit, a building modelling program, from Revit Technologies of Massachusetts in 2002.

The address has moved as well. Wikipedia says San Rafael, California, had been the company’s headquarters since 1994, and that in 2022 Autodesk moved its headquarters to San Francisco. The 2021 identity, with its mechanical-part “A”, was introduced the year before that move.

The result is a brand built in layers. At the top sits the corporate name, set in capitals beside the logomark and a black-and-white base with four accent colours. Beneath it sit product names with histories of their own, from AutoCAD, renamed from Riddle’s Interact, to Maya and MotionBuilder from Alias and Revit from Revit Technologies, with the media and entertainment logos redrawn in 2022 to sit in the same family.

For a design guide, Autodesk shows how a corporate mark can borrow its form from the work its customers do, and how a typeface and a small set of named colours can bind acquired product names into one family. Compare Adobe, another California software company whose product names sit under a single corporate brand, and Blender, a 3D program used for the same kind of modelling and animation work as Maya and 3ds Max. For this guide we use clay, plant, iris and graphite with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Autodesk’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.