We are logo designers
Versatility is super important when you are starting a company. There are two of us and we need to get a lot of things done and get them done quickly. When you have no money to hire specialists (lawyers, designers, etc.) you need to be creative.
When we decided to write this blog we realized that we needed a logo immediately. We needed a Twitter account to signup for medium and we needed Twitter and Facebook to distribute our writing. Those accounts needed profile images. This post is about how we got to the first version of our logo.
Since we don’t have a designer on our team, we had two options for designing a logo: 1) design it ourselves or 2) find someone else to do it for free or on the cheap. Greg’s mom had success with a crowd-sourced logo design contest for her real estate company so his step-dad offered to pay for us to run a design contest (~$300). On Tuesday, we wanted to focus on coding and to just have an initial logo quickly so we decided to try it out.
We had some initial concept ideas and sketches that we made right after we settled on the name Growthkit. We wanted to draw an arrow up to the right or a rocket with code. Here are the sketches:
We also experimented with an emoji concept ☺.
We posted our sketches along with some logos we liked and a description of what we were looking for on 99designs and our contest was live within 30 minutes. The process was really simple and we were very optimistic. Then the designs started to come in. Some designers had clearly not even read our specs. We had over 15 designs within 24 hours but we didn’t really like any of them. We started to doubt that we were going to get a design we liked from the process. We also realized that it was not going to be easy to design a simple and attractive logo for our initial concept. Here are some of the first designs we got:
So we decided to change our concept. We were going to go with a growth chart. We changed our contest description but we were still not getting high quality submissions. I realized that with the new concept I could probably design a logo pretty quickly and of better quality to the designs on 99designs. The 99designs feedback loop seemed inefficient and I thought it might be better for us to just do it ourselves.
On Wednesday night, while my wife Rachel was at Yoga, I popped open fireworks and built my first version within 15 minutes. I showed it to her when she got home and she liked it and I was enthused.
When I woke up at 3:30am, to my son Jonah’s cries, I started thinking about the logo and couldn’t fall back to sleep like he did. I got up and spent a couple hours on it. I decided on some colors, found some fonts I liked and found that Google has an awesome font exploration site. I made some cool concepts and emailed them to Greg.
When Greg and I got together on Thursday we decided to cancel our 99designs contest (they have an awesome no questions asked money back cancellation policy). In hindsight, design contest sites seem like a good service for someone lacking any design skills but if you want a simple logo and you have any experience in Adobe Fireworks or something similar you are probably better off just choosing a font and doing it yourself.
We spent two hours pairing on the logo; talking about what we want, choosing a font and experimenting with the chart. We wanted a simple font that doesn’t draw attention. We thought about just scrapping the chart icon but decided it was really cool that we were able to design an icon that clearly articulates what value we are bringing. Rachel was able to immediately say “Oh, it’s like you were growing slowly and then you use Growthkit and you grow really fast!” We came away on our first version (we’d love your feedback!)
I’m sure the logo will evolve over time and will be completely revamped once we hire a professional designer. But for now Greg and I are both logo designers. If Growthkit doesn’t work out, maybe we’ll just enter contests on 99designs :-).
