BricaBox Blog

In the comments section of a post by Path101 Foudner/CEO Charlie O’Donnell, I recently advised him not to go out early in the start-up process and pay a designer or firm to develop a company logo for him.

I said,

Don’t settle on a logo early and don’t let someone outside the company do it. Yes, you need a better one — and fairly soon but don’t lock yourself in and don’t lock your eventual full-time designer out of the process.

Charlie liked this advice, so I thought I’d follow up by posting a series of logos we’ve been using for the past 7 months. The point here is that while your company is developing its product, it’s also developing its identity. Identity comes from product, and product comes from mission and execution over time.

This first one was designed my yours truly on the occasion of launching this very blog, which occurred a few weeks after of unveiling the “larger purpose” behind our company. The font is Abadi MT Condensed Extra Bold.

I needed business cards before the Web 2 Expo so this was Kyle’s beautiful rush-job at a better logo (this is on the business cards I still have today). You’ll notice the term “Social Knitting” — part of that “larger purpose” mentioned above — remains in the logo but the speech bubble moved into a “box.” The font changed to Gotham.

As we started building the BricaBox Platform (first lines of code etched the first week of June), we decided we needed a new, simpler logo. Kyle moved the speech bubble around the name (which was actually also done with the business cards) and removed the speech bubble. Instead of highlighting the social phenomenon we expected out of the app, we wanted to emphasize the great utility we were about to provide. The term “Social Knitting” was dropped from the logo. The font was Calvert.

As we dug in deep for the final push before our public alpha/private beta (choose one), planned for mid-October, Kyle reinvented the logo in mid-September along with a new layout. We had learned a lot about our app over the last few months, both in terms of functionality and corporate message. This logo came out when around the time we added a new developer to the team and as we were putting finishing touches on the Executive Summary. As Kyle explained to me, the pixelated box to the left of the company name is a distorted “B.” The font is back to Gotham.

The night before sending out our first “Executive Summary” to an interested investor, I realized that with one simple change, we could instill our logo with some amazing spirit by making one of the 16 pixelated squares a blue dot. There were so may metaphors and feelings which made this change feel good. The blue square was a window — a diamond in the rough.

So here we are, about a month from launching the site, and we’re still not completely done with the logo. Kyle still needs to make this a vector image and will likely tighten up some stuff in the process. Meanwhile, though we’re in love with the pixelated squares, we’ve come up with a brilliant idea for a way to add to it, which is still to be seen and announced.

Over time, we’ve gotten to know our product better, and the logo has changed to reflect that. We still think BricaBox is a “Social Knitting” application, but now think it’s best to let heady concepts become evident over time, after the product is out. Also, we think that pitching BricaBox as a social application makes it sound run-of-the-mill. Isn’t everything “social” these days? Not everything is BricaBox, though. We want our logo to respect that.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.