How I designed the logo for CoMaps - and the lesson it taught me

September 6, 2025
Michael
Blog

A longer version of this blog post, including more in-between design stages, was originally published on my blog on September 05, 2025.

A few months ago, I was looking for a new maps application to replace Mapy.cz on my Android phone, which I had been using for the past few years. In an unexpected chain of events, this ultimately led me to design the official logo for CoMaps, a community-driven fork of Organic Maps. It still blows my mind to see my creation as the logo of an app that thousands of people use every day!

This experience not only allowed me to make my first meaningful contribution to an open-source project (which makes me incredibly proud) but it also opened my eyes to the myriad ways individuals can get involved in the open-source world, even without any coding skills. In this post, I will outline the full story, share behind-the-scenes insights, and early drafts from the design process. But let's start from the beginning.

How I discovered CoMaps

My requirements for the new maps app were quite simple. It should be:

  • Based on OpenStreetMaps (usually great maps for hiking/exploring)
  • Open-source and privacy-respecting (made by humans for humans)
  • Offline Maps and Navigation (no dependence on connectivity)
  • Easy to use with a smooth UI/UX (I love OsmAnd for it's power features, but I don't like to daily drive it)

Those requirements quickly led me to Organic Maps, a well-regarded staple in the open-source Navigation Space. While the app itself works perfectly fine, I did discover an open letter from long-standing contributors, raising concerns about the project's governance and transparency.

Because those concerns were not adequately addressed by the maintainers of Organic Maps, a new fork was created. CoMaps was born. The main goals of this fork are to develop a community-driven, not-for-profit open-source application with maximum transparency and a commitment to community-led decision-making. That sounded promising.

Intrigued, I installed the first test release, created a Codeberg account, and joined the discussion. I was welcomed warmly by the highly motivated contributors, and I immediately appreciated the commitment to involve the community in all meaningful decisions. Only days after my first encounter, I was able to participate in the voting process to determine the main color scheme for the app. That was fun and felt meaningful.

Over the next weeks, I created my first issues for improvements, bugs, and feature requests in the main CoMaps-Repo and enjoyed the constructive discussion that evolved around them - how cool is that? I can get involved in the development of an app by providing feedback? That's pretty neat.

Then I found an issue titled Create project logo - community ideation and iteration and decided to take a look. Following the naming process and decision of the color scheme, a logo was supposed to be the next step in the "branding process" to find the new visual identity of the project. That sounded exciting, so I kept scrolling through the issue, where people were already discussing the first ideas and concepts for the new CoMaps logo. And, well - I got sucked right in.

My mind is weird sometimes - I tend to get random sparks of inspiration, which often burn short but bright and result in an unexpected deep dive. Well, this was one of those sparks: I was immediately inspired by the early idea submissions, and my mind started to circle ideas of my own. Which leads us to...

The design process

I will structure the design process into sections and share personal insights for each stage, starting from my first concept sketches all the way to the final refined submissions.

Please note that, while I do have a light design background - I studied Game Design for a couple of semesters and have regularly dabbled with (digital) art - I am not a "real" (professional) designer by any means.

The ideation phase

The first thing I did (after looking through the already posted ideas) was to rip out a sheet of paper from a notebook and scribble down my very first, truly rough concepts. I was just brainstorming ideas that played with the letters "C" and "M" from "CoMaps" and with symbols that I associated with the theme of "Maps" and "Navigation".

My first sketches & drafts for the CoMaps-Logo - not pretty, but a solid start to get thinking

During that process, I noticed that the name "CoMaps" shares all the same letters with the word "Compass", which was one of my first symbolic associations for a navigation app. And well... I grew quite fond of the idea and started to ideate a lot of drafts based on this concept.

The feedback I received on those early drafts led to more drafts exploring different ideas, which all tried to incorporate the (in my opinion) main values + selling points of CoMaps in some way or another:

  • It is a maps/navigation app
  • It is community-driven and open-source

In my mind, a "good" logo should somehow communicate those values, while staying simple, easy to read and recognize, and without relying (too much) on colours so that it can easily be used in many circumstances (e.g., monochrome without a background). So these became my personal "guiding principles" from now on, which resulted in a ton of new concepts. Can you tell that I spend a lot of my evenings on this?

Based on additional community feedback, I continued to experiment and add drafts to the discussion. At this "early" stage of finding a design, my philosophy has always been to "get ideas out" so that they can be talked about - it does not matter if they are "good" or pretty - as long as they are created, people will have opinions on them which they wouldn't if the concept did not exist. I find that this approach leads to more insights as it quickly irons out what resonates and what does not.

All of this happened in this issue on Codeberg, if you want to take a closer look yourself.

In the end, the maintainers of the project organised a first community voting round (June 7, 2025) to narrow down the options to the most popular ones, for which I submitted the following designs:

And it turned out, four of my propositions were chosen to advance to the next stage among some lovely ideas from other contributors! Which leads us to the next stage...

The refinement phase

During this stage, I tried to refine each of my concepts based on community feedback and personal ideas. You can read my longer version of this post to see all the iteration stages.

You can also see the different iterations on Codeberg:

The rule for the final voting round stated that only one version of each logo-concept should be submitted, which confronted me with some really tough decisions - especially for the CM-Split-Concept, where I had an especially tough time making a choice! But I somehow managed to choose an option after a long (mental) debate, which finally brings us to...

The final voting round

After refining the logos for several weeks (and spending some lovely camping/hiking weekends using CoMaps with friends), it was finally time for the final community decision to determine the new logo of CoMaps. A new issue was created to host the voting, and an initial post explained all the rules for this process. To enable an even playing field, one of the contributors (@yannikbloscheck) had kindly created a unified presentation of all the submissions in different scenarios, including mockups for both iOS and Android.

On the 9th of July, the final voting process started with the official announcements on all social channels of the CoMaps-Team.

And so the voting began, and with it a new (personal) obsession to impulsively check my phone to take a look at the current state of thumbs-ups - despite all my best efforts to use my phone less ^^

And so the voting began, and with it a new (personal) obsession to impulsively check my phone to take a look at the current state of thumbs-ups - despite all my best efforts to use my phone less ^^ The winning logo

After five long days, the results were finally in. The community had made a decision.

Meet the new CoMaps-Logo.... Made by me! o.O

Yes, roughly three months after my first post in the CoMaps-Project on Codeberg, I had contributed the new logo for the app!

I feel incredibly honoured and grateful that my proposition was chosen, from all the great submissions, to represent CoMaps. I want to express a big "thank you" to all the people from the CoMaps Community who supported me along the way with encouraging words and/or valuable feedback. an I also want to thank all the people working on the project and organizing the community for their efforts! It still feels unreal to me to see my logo as an app on my phone screen, on the website, or as the profile picture on Mastodon. I can assure you that this is a truly great feeling!

🌱 I personally view this Logo as a base concept for me or others to build on - I am totally open to refinements/iterations in the future!

Everyone can contribute

This has been a crazy experience for me, which has secured a definite spot among my highlight moments of this year! Unexpectedly, it also taught me an important lesson:

Contributing to open-source projects isn't limited to writing code. Designers, translators, writers, and testers/users all play crucial roles in the ecosystem. For instance, CoMaps thrives on community involvement in various capacities, from adding locations to OpenStreetMap, over translating text, to providing feedback on features.

This sounds so trivial, but for me, this was kind of a revelation, as I had previously shied away from participating in any projects out of my perceived lack of skill. That's not the case - everyone can contribute something, regardless of skill or time constraints. That's why I want to encourage you to get involved yourself!

If you have any app/project you like using, look into it and find out what you could contribute. Open-source only works when people get involved! It's people like you and me who decided to offer their skills, time, and energy to the community that make free, privacy-respecting, and open-source software possible.

And it's not a one-sided endeavour either. I can assure you that you will get a ton of benefits in return for your efforts:

  • Gratitude and the truly great feeling of working on something "bigger than you"
  • New friendships and connections, as it is quite likely, the people you meet while contributing are nice and share similar interests
  • Free Knowledge - no matter what you do, you will likely learn a lot - from soft-skills like constructive feedback and communication, all the way to technical insights from people who are far more knowledgeable than you. Also, don't underestimate the "learning by doing factor"
  • A "better" software experience for yourself - Contributing allows you to influence the development and shape the tool in a desirable direction
  • Potentially career capital, as many companies (especially in tech) value a portfolio of open-source contributions

How to get started

I don't know about you, but that sounds like a win-win situation to me! So what are you waiting for? Visit the website of an interesting project and look for its get involved section. Most projects will also have some sort of communication space (e.g., Forum, a Telegram or Matrix channel) and their code and assets organized on GitHub or its (arguably better) alternatives like Codeberg, GitLab, etc. Find out what they use and create the necessary accounts to start participating.

Oftentimes, they will also have some documentation to help you get started: a code of conduct, good starter issues, or things that need to be done. If you feel lost or don't know where to go, don't be shy - just ask someone and they'll most likely love to help you out!

Checklist to get started

To help you get started, here's a short 5-Step Checklist for you to follow:

  • Pick your project (based on your interests)
  • Join the conversation in the forum/chat
  • Find the repo and create an account
  • Read the documentation for new contributors
  • Leave a first constructive comment or ask your first question

And remember, contributions can come in all shapes and sizes - from adding your opinion on an issue, to fixing bugs in the code, translating text, writing documentation, designing things, all the way to moderating the forum/chat. The possibilities are endless, and chances are high that you'll find something that suits you!

If you don't want to get your hands dirty, that's of course totally fine too. You can still talk about your preferred projects in your social circle (to spread the word), or consider donating if you have the means and the project accepts that.

Anyways - that's it from me. I hope this read was somewhat interesting and entertaining, and more importantly, I hope I successfully convinced you to look into contributing yourself! The open-source community needs all the help it can get - so let's step up, do our part, and have a ton of fun along the way!

Oh, I almost forgot... CoMaps has indeed become the Mapy-Replacement I searched for. It is now my main maps/navigation app on my phone. It's free, beautiful, works offline, and best of all, it feels super smooth to use (I love zooming in and out). Sure, it's not perfect (yet), but the community is working on it and I am sure we will get there!

Sources - Codeberg Issues

I have made an effort to always link my sources right in the text. For your convenience, I curated this list of relevant Codeberg issues in chronological order. Feel free to dig through the links if you wish to dive even deeper into the whole process!

Feedback

I hope you enjoyed that long wall of text (and pictures). If yes, I'd love to hear your feedback, as I'm still new to writing blog posts and trying to figure things out :) I would also love to know which design you personally liked most and why!