Preview Logo Quarterfinals

Continuing work here: RefiningQuarterFinalLogos

Context and Process

Trevor, Sean, Jake, Priscilla and I have been meeting for the last month as an offshoot of the Branding effort to work on a logo for Chandler. We started with a brief overview of the concept and word exercises we did as a part of the naming process and proceeded with a series of visual exercises that have led to a wealth of design ideas. You can review the work we've done here: VisualBrainstormWIP. I encourage you to look here after you've reviewed the concepts below in plain black and white and to try and focus your responses on the monochrome rendering.

After several rounds of generating ideas and riffing on each others ideas, we narrowed the field to these 6 concepts. We would like to collect feedback on just these 6 ideas to tighten the scope even more to a final 3, at which point, we will start applying visual treatments. We will then collect another round of feedback on visual treatments on the list and finalize the set we present to Mitch, who will make the final call.

The rationale behind the 6 we chose to solicit feedback on

• We wanted a logo that would be able to stand up as a strong personification of Chandler. A mascot so-to-speak, with 'personality'.
• We looked for concepts that more-or-less 'clearly' embodied our brand in a unique way.
• We wanted to temper the 'masculine' tilt of our product name, 'Chandler' with a logo that was gender-neutral.
• We need something that will both 'fit-in' on the desktop and stand-out on the desktop if that makes any sense. In other words, something with weight, that feels like a real-life object, yet still embodies 'iconic' properties. In plain English, that means, a 'real' object that is a single simple object or single simple flow of energy (as opposed to composite of many pieces).

THE DRAWINGS BELOW ARE *ONLY CONCEPTUAL SKETCHES, NOT PROPOSALS FOR ACTUAL LOGOS COMPLETE WITH VISUAL TREATMENTS.

Please review the concepts below with these 5 questions in mind and reply to the list with your answers.

1. Which key brand concepts apply to this image?

• Pro-social / Close collaboration
• Adaptable
• Productive
• Empowered / Confident
• Organized/Better Decisions

• Seeing the forest for the trees
• Flexible and rich information management

• Innovation / Excellence

2. What other concepts does this image evoke?

3. Which concepts, are stronger for this image? The Chandler brand concepts? or other concepts associated with this image.

4. How common is this image in our 'brand-space': Sharing, Collaboration,

5. Now onto the squishier stuff: What does this image make you feel?

1. Happiness?
2. Warmth?
3. Calm?
4. Excitement?
5. Hardcore?
6. Cold?
7. Add your own.

Proposals

From left to right, top to bottom:

1. Pinwheel
2. Orange
3. Starfish
4. Dolphin
5. Petroglyph
6. Abstraction No.3, What does it look like to you?

• quarterfinals.png:
  

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Results

BRAND ASSOCIATIONS
Starfish conjured up the most brand associations, 24 with Adaptability as the strongest association. Dolphin came in second with 19, followed closely by Pinwheel, 17 and then Orange, 13. Petroglyph and Abstraction had 7 and 2, respectively.

POSITIVE VERSUS NEGATIVE
Pinwheel had unequivocally positive associations, particularly around productivity because of their similarity to windmills. The only minus was that people felt like they had seen the logo elsewhere, although interestingly, no one could remember exactly where.

The Orange was also viewed in an unequivocally positive light. Pro-social and Organized were the two strongest branding associations, both derived from the 'compartmentalized' nature of oranges, making them at once orderly entities that are share-able.

People had both positive and negative associations with Starfish. Positive ones were related to the Brand concepts (Adaptability, Collaboration, Ability to juggle many things at once) or happy memories of snorkeling. Negative associations had to do with a fear of unknown, cold, slimy sea animals. Starfish are not slimy themselves, but they co-habitate with slimy creatures: squid, jellyfish, and seaweed. Starfish have been used a lot in family-oriented software, in particular parental content controls for online browsing.

Apparently, Dolphins are just the poster-child for everything good in the world. The Dolphin had the most even distribution across the brand concepts. Everyone had good things to say about dolphins. The only minus, which was repeated 5 times in the specific and 1 time in the general is that it is used elsewhere, in particular, by MySQL^?.

Petroglyph had generally positive associations. On the whole, it seemed that responses were less effusive, the connection between the petrogyph and the brand concepts were perhaps less obvious. This may have had to do with the word 'Petroglyph' itself, which admittedly is not particularly 'Chandler-like' since it refers to pre-historic fossils. It seemed to distract many people from respoding to the specific rendering of the petroglyph: a single person mysteriously connected to some greater entity via a...umbilical cord?

The Abstraction was downright opaque for most. Although we did get some color imaginings out of some. This is the nature of many abstract of logos, they oftentimes don't stand up well in monochrome with no visual treatment to elucidate their meaning. I may also have screwed things up a bit because I tweaked the original design (apologies).

BRANDING VERSUS OTHER ASSOCIATIONS
Starfish had the most definitive relationship to the brand concepts with Dolphin, Orange and Pinwheel teetering in after. Dolphin suffered from the MySQL association.

Mimi

I won't repeat here what others have already said:

Pinwheel

• Spiral motion: Triage cycle
• Original treatment of the pinwheel colored each leaf of the pinwheel represented a Triage status
• You can imagine it as a corporate logo: Some R&D company or a new 'clean fuel' company.

Orange

• Fruit --> Fertile --> Productive
• Spiral - A riff on the pinwheel and triage
• Refreshing
• Nutritious
• Tropicana girl
• Brunch --> Waffles with fruit and powdered sugar

Starfish

• Distributed management structure: Cutting off a single arm won't kill the Starfish, it just grows a new one.
• Hub and spokes - Helen the Hub
• Radiating --> Generative --> Productive
• Star of Excellence
• Connecting the dots to form a larger picture - 5 point star
• Kids collecting stuff on the beach
• Pottery Barn seaside cottage display case decor
• Museum of Natural History display cases
• Patrick, Sponge-Bob Squarepant's sidekick, yes he's a starfish

Aside: Visual treatment itself can make cold starfish seem warm and friendly :o)

Petroglyph

• Umbilical cord / Womb --> Fertile --> Productive
• Human energy suction pods in The Matrix
• Works as a wordmark - the womb forms a C for Chandler
• Sharing that is designed around the individual's personal world (as opposed to a sharing portal)
• This is an interesting riff on the 'person / avatar' logo, which admittedly is overused in this space, because it is an organic, irregular human and not the typical AIM and MSN Messenger people with perfect spheres for heads.

Dolphin

• Complex coordination, working together as a team to catch prey
• Effective communication
• Very strong associations with Enviornmentalism
• New age crystals and turquoise jewelry
• Paintings of dolphins leaping in a sunburst of light by California Coastal artists: http://images.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=dolphin%20paintings&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

• Represents all things good
• Like Superman - So perfect as to be generic.

Abstraction

• An arm (white) holding clasped to one's side, holding something together
• A collection, a grouping
• Doesn't provoke an emotional response in me