So, we have a new site and a new logo. You might have noticed. We can fake web design in house, but doing a new logo was out of reach. We needed help.

On Finding Reinforcements

I asked around. There were two suggestions that came my way multiple time: 99designs and David Pache.  David’s portfolio is stunningly good, so the decision wasn’t hard, and personally I’ve always been a bit squeamish about 99designs:  lots of people competing for a chance to get one sub-market price.  It just doesn’t seem like a system that would be biased towards high quality work.  Certainly the best designers would avoid it like the plague.

But there’s another more subtle reason that I’m glad we went with a great logo designer:  they’re better than me at picking quality logos.  If I were deciding from 20 logo designs on 99designs, I’d have been hard pressed to pick the best one.  In fact, David sent us 4 mockups, and we didn’t know which one to pick.  I’m glad this one was his favorite as we’ve since warmed to it.  We were using the current one as a stand-in when a bit of serendipity made things more interesting.

The Other Whiteboard Artifact

Yesterday, Paul Graham posted “A Whiteboard Artifact” about us mapping out some of our company is about — but that wasn’t the whole whiteboard.  When he was drawing out how to explain what we do, here’s what he drew on the right half of the board:

Notice anything?  Yeah, we did too.  Here’s our new logo in full-ginormus-glory:

Previously, amusingly, we weren’t sure if the new logo quite captured what we do.  Having an advisor duplicate it on the whiteboard, never having seen it — or even knowing that we were evaluating logos — once again made the decision easy.

And that’s the story of our new logo.  For a little more visual goodness, check out the corporate identity page that David put together, including some insight on the iterations in the design process.  We’re glad to have worked with him.