logo

I unintentionally won a logo design contest. I didn't mean to, really.

This guy posted to the Northeast Ohio Performing Arts (e-mail) List saying he was starting up a small educational software business and was holding a logo contest. First prize was $100 plus $50 for each year they used the logo, second prize $50, third prize $25. Since for-profit companies generally pay a minimum of $1,000 (typically more like $4,000) for a well-designed logo, I didn't have much interest in submitting anything.

But then he posted to the list a few days later asking if anyone would like to critique the submissions. I happen to have an interest in logos, as my three books full of nothing but logos will attest, so I replied saying I'd be interested in offering my opinions. Frankly, as I predicted, they were pretty poor as far as logos were concerned. Most of them would not be easily reproducible on various promotional media, such as t-shirts, pens, and trade show banners. Most of them would require full color printing, which is more expensive than spot colors, and would not convert well to simple black. And most of them would be difficult to recreate as vector art, which means they would have to remain a raster image and there would be an upper limit to how large it could be scaled, and in general the lines would not be as crisp.

There were pieces and parts of a few that I thought worked, so I told him that. In the course of exchanging a few e-mails with this guy and swapping opinions, I got to the point where I couldn't really express in words what I thought he needed. I decided instead to just whip up something in Freehand:





One of his logo submissions -- which was actually just something he'd thrown together as a demonstration -- split the company name into "accu" and "sess" using two colors, which, I pointed out, makes it clear how it should be pronounced. Until I saw it written that way, my eyes blurred every time I saw the name. However, if that logo were printed in just black, the same problem would exist. I suggested something in italics, both to get around this problem, and to give the image some movement. Italicizing "sess" would lead the reader's eye off to the right quickly, so I chose to italicize "accu" instead. By the way, the name is a portmanteau of "accurate assessment." Even with my solution for the logo, people I show it to comment that it's hard to say... but I digress.

Personally, I liked the purple and green best; the star was just something I played around with, but I wasn't happy with how it turned out. Someone else's logo submission turned the capital A into an A+, which I thought was a good way to incorporate an educational theme. But he said that, since their software intends to help students score better on standardized tests, an "A+" would not apply, but a checkmark would. So I added a checkmark to my design and came up with this:



Same basic idea, just two colors, easily reproducible at various sizes and on various media. But I kept playing around with color combinations and stumbled upon this:



The second one down. See it? An apple! It's not blatantly obvious, not screaming "Hi, I'm an apple!!," but the hint is there. This disappears when printed in plain black, but the logo still works. It's also three colors instead of two, but black is pretty cheap, and often there would be black text on the page anyway.

He showed the submissions to some of his friends who worked for advertising agencies, and they voted that mine was the best. The only thing they didn't like was the "e" in sess. This is a part of the Kabel font and is what makes Kabel, Kabel. This was the font he originally used in his demo logo, which is why I used it; I also thought it made it slightly less formal and stodgy, since their product is geared toward students. Simply rotating the "e" looked incredibly wrong, so I just changed the font to Gill Sans.

Thus, the final design is:





I picked up my check yesterday, and he's going to send me some promotional materials once they're printed, so I can add them to my portfolio. He also runs a laser engraving business, so he made me a small wooden plaque and a few wooden keychains with my design on it. Very cool.

Considering how little effort I put into it, I made out fairly well. I won't be doing any more cheapies, though, at least not with for-profit companies; this was sort of a fluke. Still, it was kinda fun to design a logo that I know will be used for at least five years.