Our old logo was a traced illustration — a 145-kilobyte SVG that looked fine on a business card and terrible everywhere software actually lives: browser tabs, home screens, 16-pixel favicons. Time to start over.
We generated 66 concepts across ten families: solid peaks, monoline ridges, letterform monograms built from R·M·A, chevron stacks, app-tile marks. Each one was tested at three sizes down to 16 pixels, against light and dark chips, and across the three accent themes the site supports.
The winner is what we call Snowcap Contours: three nested topographic contours of a single peak — two fading outline levels and a solid summit snowfield. Three levels for the three words in Rocky Mountain Apps. The contour language is borrowed from the maps you'd actually carry into the Rockies, which felt right for a software studio named after them.
The mark is under one kilobyte, draws in currentColor so it recolors with any theme, and doubles as our first-ever favicon. The same geometry now echoes through the site — in section markers, the footer backdrop, and the product cards — so the whole site reads as one system.
Lesson from the exercise: the strongest logo concepts were the ones that survived the 16-pixel test. If it doesn't read as a favicon, it doesn't read.