With a name decided and the character illustration style identified we were finally able to start thinking about what our logo would look like.
Again, as with the characters and the names it’s hard to know exactly where to start as there were so many options available to us. What font should we use? What colour? Did we want it to look simple and be a stand alone word or did we want to incorporate an icon into the name. Would it look better if we used a combination of upper and lower case letters or should we stick to all lower case? And would any of the letters be treated in a different way to stand out a little but more, maybe making them bigger or giving them a slightly different colour? Each decision made here could have a significant impact on the overall look of the logo so we had to get it right.
We started by trawling the Internet and looking for some cool looking logos that we could use as a benchmark. The obvious good examples are twitter and skype. Actually it’s strange to see that so many brands use a really similar logos at the moment- basically a bright blue colour curvey font with a white curvey border surrounding it. Blue definitely seemed to be the colour of the moment for one reason or another. It’s probably because it looked so good – cool, modern, trendy and most importantly of all, eye-catching. We also found some examples of web 2.0 logos, to give us an idea of what we needed to do to ensure that it had a modern look that we wanted our site to be known for.
We decided to brief a designer that Hirsh had met through his company – just to see what he could come up with. We really hoped that we would be blown-away with the results, as it could be the making of our brand and take our identity to a new, more complete level for the first time. We gave him a detailed design brief and waited a few weeks to see what he would come back with. When we heard that the designer was ready to send over his design concepts we were really excited. But to say that we were disappointed when we saw them was a huge understatement. It felt like such a huge letdown. Actually I was pretty gutted really as it was clear that we still had a lot of work to do on this and were as far away as ever from having our logo finalised. The design concepts that we saw were fairly bland and unmemorable. One design in particular used a combination of pink and orange colours that I’d never dream of using in a million years. It’s not that they were bad designs; it’s just that they were totally not right for what we wanted. I guess it all comes down to personal opinion and this is what makes it so difficult because what’s good to one person may be bad for another. The feeling and impression given may be totally different.
Going through this process made me realise more than ever how hard it was to describe to people what we actually wanted. It made me think that it’d probably be easier to do it ourselves. I felt like a frustrated designer – I have all these mad ideas in my head but don’t have the tools or skills to transport them into reality. As far as we were concerned we never wanted this deisgner to ever darken our door again.
We took the matter in our own hands and started playing around on Photoshop to see what we could come up with. Surprisingly, and in little time at all, Hirsh developed the core of our logo which has stayed the same ever since, though there have been a few slight modifications. Instantly we were happy with it, probably because it resembled the blue/white web 2.0 look. It felt like we were cheating a little bit, but we liked the design and that was the most important thing. There’d be no point in developing something alternative just for the sake of it. It made us realise that there’s probably a reason why a lot of logos were designed this way in the first place.
We may not have the most unique logo in the world, but with a strapline explaining what the website is about, a set of character icons for each theme and a strong brand name, we felt that we had a powerful brand identity. This was really important to create a solid foundation to grow. Any of these brand identity elements may change and be enhanced along the way – they’re definitately not set in stone – but we feel that we’ve at least given ourselves a fighting chance of making something of the site and giving it a platform to stand out amongst all the other sites our there doing similar things to us.
