At around Pi-hour on Friday afternoon we successfully launched our new website. The night before (the night of the big storm for Bay Area folks), Andres and I were out with a dear former colleague and I mentioned I was going to blog about our new branding, new website, and new name. She said, “You can’t do that, it’s a math blog, nobody is interested in branding!” To which I replied, “What other company do you know used their own software to create their logo? Our branding is math.” We then had another drink.

Let me explain. We were working with a very talented designer and trying to communicate we wanted a logo that expressed math in motion to match our new tag line of “bringing math to life.”  He came back with some wonderful designs but none of them felt quite right to us. Our favorite was a design that had eight colored petals but it didn’t deeply resonate. I was talking to Milan, our CFO, about it and as he wandered over to the local coffee shop for his “Milan special” he sent me an email that simply read, “Not fewer petals, more petals, 22 to be exact.” I knew exactly what he meant. The day before he and I were in a business development meeting with Steve Rasmussen, where Steve constructed the “pi-petal rose” by way of introducing construction in Sketchpad. People are always delighted to see a visual representation of Pi for the first time–something very familiar seen in a new way. With a little finessing by the designer we’ve adopted the pi-petal rose as our new logo.

In addition to the new website and logo we’ve changed our name. We’re dropping Press from our name and just going by Key Curriculum. Press suggests printing and that’s not the trajectory we’re on. Also, our old colophon was an image of an open book so that had to go too. It has been replaced with the pi-petal rose.

The new website was built from scratch—out with the old, in with the new. The site emphasizes our learning tools and also provides many free resources to help you get started with Sketchpad, Fathom, and TinkerPlots. The number one thing we hear from teachers is “I’d love to use Sketchpad (or Fathom, or TinkerPlots) but I’m not sure how to get started.” With the release of Sketchpad 5 we built extensive getting started resources (videos, tutorials, activities, etc.) into the application and we still heard the same thing. We’ve now taken all of those resources and put them on the website for free. Enjoy exploring them at the Learning Center.

I hope you like the new site. We’ve tried to make everything easier for you. You can download free trial versions of our software, access free resources, and sign up for our popular Tech Tuesday webinars. No excuses not to get started.

Many thanks to the amazing team at Key who made all this possible in 14 weeks from start to finish!

By the way, the Greek word for rose is triantafillo, or thirty petals. They should change it to ekosidiofillo, or 22 petals.  Archimedes would be pleased if they did!