Getting started
Once we settled on the name (a whole other story!), it was time to tackle the logo.
We started by brainstorming the following concepts:
Desired characteristics:
- Distinct, stands out
- Visually impressive
- will work in black and white and in different sizes
Desirable feelings and concepts to reflect:
- friendly
- community
- online
And we felt that the color scheme should relate to real-world apricot fruit or tree
First options
Well, the above was not that much input so our designer took a few days to brainstorm on his own and came up with a bunch of interesting drafts:
Another brainstorming session, a lot of very diverse feedback...For any given option there were people who loved it and those who hated it.
But we had to move forward so we decided to group and narrow down our selections to the following:
- Person plus tree - similar to options 06, 07, 10, 16. Especially simple one like 07.
- A "stylized" person - like in options 20, 24
- Friendly tree - like option 22
- People around apricot - like option 08. Maybe fewer people. How can it be simplified?
We also realized that we should incorporate product name into the logo.
Off to the races!
Round 2
One really funky idea came up:
Looks interesting, but we figured it is a wrong association to communicate - worms and software...
The mainstream options generated were:
More brainstorming and heated discussions.
I had to put my foot down and summarized the next steps:
- 01, 11, 09 seemed too boring
- 03 - looked too much like a bomb dropped from a plane! Out.
- 06 - people felt that a tree-person should have two legs, not just a trunk
- 13 - not interesting enough, (using only apricot icon seems too simplistic...)
- 08 did not work - with "Wild" placed on the second line
Overall, idea of a person seems fine. The best person-tree option we liked was #10 (vs. #04 or 07)
Also, we decided to check if option 12 can be modified with a person on the left and name larger (so that two lines of name are same total height as person-tree). In other words, take #05, reduce apricot, add #10 on the left.
And on and on...
Denis (our designer) could not constrain his creativity and generated a bunch of new interesting options:
Here is what we figured after reviewing them:
- Having a logo and a name so that they can be used together or separately is a good idea
- We really have to finalize our choices
- Making the letter "O" look like an apricot fruit is probably too much apricot in the logo!
- We should start trying different fonts for the name
- Our hopes high that the end is near, we narrowed down our choices to:
- Slide 6, Option 3; Option 2 but without "letter O apricot"; with different fonts
- Slide 2 with variations, maybe with different name fonts
- Slide 6, Option 09-12 maybe with different bodies of people so they do not look like tombstones!; try different font for name, try using two people of same size (so they do not look like mother & child)
Are we there yet?
For some reason, we all warmed up to the leaf-person idea. And with our hopes up that we are narrowing down our options...Damn designers tempting us
More discussions, decisions...
Hey, we are down to 4 main options!
It's about time to have fun with fonts:
Another attempt to throw us off the rails!
While we were taking our time to discuss fonts, Denis could not sit still and tried to distract us with a bunch of new ideas:
Almost there
We stayed firm and ended up with three finalists:
I came up with an idea to depict the apricot person lying down - to illustrate that our software will do all the work while users can chill out!
But this seemed too sexy for a software logo so we dropped it.
And the winner is...
Drums...
Introducing Wild Apricot:
Well, that it took quite a bit of time - but was very interesting experience. People feel good about our logo, it communicates the personal and relaxed philosophy behind our product.
And now on to continue the development work!