Creating a logo

I complained earlier that I had no branding on my blog, which is still true. But the big hold-up was in my getting off my ass and choosing a logo. Guess what… it’s finally done!

I spent a lot of time deciding on which of my doodlings to use for a logo. Let me explain how you should always approach this kind of decision for your company.

Getting input

I had thought about polling all of my friends on Facebook and asking them which logo I should use. I had about 12 to choose from (most of them pretty asstastic). Then I had thought about my company’s image and who should really be making the decision.

You know what? It’s my role to decide what my identity should be. Sure, I want to be open with the outside world and with customers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the outside world should choose my identity for me.

37 Signals says it best in their chapter about opinionated software. Those that try to please everyone will end up pleasing no one. And sometimes it’s best to make choices for your customers. Yes, you can, and should, have some control over the experience.

Maybe that’s why Adobe’s controversial new Creative Suite 3 product logos eventually grew on me. (Or maybe I just have a lot of pride about finally paying $1,000 to have the rights to have those icons on my desktop!)

What you could have chosen from (if I would have given you a choice)

Comment as you will, but here are the doodlings that I was choosing from.

Yes, I know I should be embarrassed about some of them. I hope that you can at least admire that I had the balls to put these up here.

The bottom 3 logos ended up being my favorites. I’ll probably use the very first one for technology-related marketing activities. I figured that the dashy-looking HTML comment was a little abstract for my target audience.