The Long Journey to the Logo

February 1, 2019 marks the day we finally got our logo. It was a long, winding road of over two months of racking our brains and countless intermediary versions. We had the invaluable help of a designer, partly because we wanted to tap into the power of subliminal messaging and partly because we refuted the idea of a standard, computer-generated logo.

We wanted our logo to speak to people, to catch their eye and make them wonder what it is all about, to be flexible enough to accommodate all sorts of interpretations, instead of imposing our own view. And even though we feel we could have gone a bit further and that the logo is not yet mature enough to catch the essence of Bookups, the feedback we received so far told us we achieved most of what we set out to do. For some people it was crystal clear that it is about people discussing books, others thought of dating or hooking up, some found it very hipster-ish, others had difficulty reading the name (“What is BKUPS..?”😁).

But hey, it’s sort of what we were after, right? Something intriguing, open to interpretation. What does it all mean? Well, the font chosen is PT Serif and is quite traditional and humanistic in style, combined with modern lowercase letters. The light green bubble stands for a pool of thoughts, of surfacing ideas.

The journey of creating the logo was made longer than expected by three issues, which we prefer to call lessons learned 😉:

• The discovery — 💡Make sure you really, truly know what you want.💡When we contracted the designer we thought we had a pretty good idea of what the essence and message of Bookups are, but as we progressed we realised we were very much on a journey of discovery ourselves. The bookups we organized throughout the two month period shifted our focus from the result/outcome of the bookup to the event itself and the meeting of minds/exchange of ideas (symbolised by the green, waving cloud). Nevertheless, designing a logo is an incredibly useful attempt to summarise your entire business into one word/picture. And for this reason alone, I recommend all startupers out there to take this step sooner rather than later✌🏽.
• The lack of a common channel of communication — 💡Make sure you & the designer use the same definition of words.💡One of the challenges of working on the logo was finding out that the designer has a specific vocabulary which is more restricted than I would have liked, and which did not accommodate everything we felt we wanted to communicate (feelings, impressions etc). On top of that, “designer words” sometimes took on different meanings than those we were used to (e.g.: human for me meant with human-like features, while for a designer it could mean colour, sharpness of edges etc).
• High expectations — 💡Don’t expect the designer to read your mind.💡We both (Radu less, due to his experience, but I more…) expected that the essence of Bookups would be easier to communicate to third parties, especially since there is no big philosophy behind it. Hence, we expected the designer to somehow intuitively reflect our desires/needs/wishes/sentiments into a logo. We thought our activity (the bookups we organised, the marketing choices etc) could be easily translated into images. However, the process proved to be more hands-on than expected…

All in all, both radudaniel and I agreed that this a great logo to get things rolling. Along the way, once we get settled in the market, and people start receiving our message and understanding what Bookups is about, we might attempt a new logo. However, the second time around we would idealy meet the designer/artist somewhere in the middle, perhaps work with someone who has gone through the experience of bookups and will intuitively understand what Bookups needs to share with the world.