Creating a Business Logo

So you want to be in business? You need a logo! This article documents the process I went through to create the logo's for UserScape (the company) and HelpSpot (our new help desk software). Hopefully this can provide some guidance for future ISV's on how the process goes.

The first step was contacting Mike Rohde of MakaluMedia. I found him via the NSLog weblog, which was having a design contest that Mike won. While everyone may not be able to get this lucky and find a great designer by accident, I do encourage you to look through the weblog world for one. Many many designers have blogs and it's a great way to see what a designer is about. Usually they'll have samples on their site, but more important is that you can go back through their blog and get a feel for how they work, their style and so on all without a lot of phone calls, emails and general back and forth.

Once I contacted Mike we went over my business plans, what sites I admire and the general feel I was looking for. Mainly I was looking for something modern, but I explicitly did not go into any great details. I prefer to let the designer come up with a variety of options first with only rough guidance. I find this usually works the best as they'll often take the design in a direction you haven't thought of. Remember you're no designer! Let them go and be free to create beautiful images, your job is to rope them in when they go too far and keep the process moving in the right direction.

Mike is the first designer I worked with who does all his conceptual drawings on actual paper (fancy that). Below are the first sketches he sent. As you can see there are a bunch of ideas on here. This is why I love letting the designer do their thing first. This is so much more productive as a first pass than if he went off and came back with 2 options because I specified everything down to the inch.

Some of the ideas here include "text as logo", a helping hand, a group of users, small group of users, and some abstract users/symbols based on an @ sign.




After some discussion we focused in on trying the "text as logo" based approach using dots to represent different features in each one. In the UserScape logo it represents a user and with the HelpSpot H it forms an exclamation point. The dot worked nice because it carried through from company logo to product logo.

Mike then went to work doing a more detailed version as well as taking one more pass at the "helping hand" theme. In the end I thought the hand was just a bit creepy and I preferred the connected feel between the UserScape and HelpSpot logos that the dot provided.


Now that the dot's were agreed upon it was time to build them in a digital format and decide on fonts. Mike has a rule about not talking about color until the end and I think it's a great rule. I know whenever I've built websites for people in the past that they always get caught up on color. It doesn't matter how much functionality is there all they want to know is if mauve would look better than magenta. Leaving the color out definitely helps keep you focused on the structural design decisions.

Here we have the initial go at it and #4 (lower right) is actually very close to the final product. It's Interstate Condensed Bold (for start of word) and Regular (for back half). Interestingly Interstate is a font that was developed for the interstate highway system. It's what you're looking at on all those big green signs.



Things were looking good, but I wanted to checkout Futura a bit more. We also decided to change the cut style on HelpSpot from rounded above the dot to flat above it. Here you can see the one we went with (lower left).


With the tough stuff over it was time to finally get down to colors. Here's the first stab at it. We tried a few different ideas here. Different colors for first word and second word, same color, same color with different first letter. They were good but nothing really stood out to me. #5 down was probably my favorite, but it was a bit too "Mets" for me, though it made me sure I wanted the dot to have a color which stood out from the rest.


For the second round a few new color combinations were added. I really liked #5 and it almost won out.


Here's the final layout. It was a very close call between #1 and #2. In the end, the way the orange dot contrasts with the darker colors works a bit better. Also Mike's wife and my wife preferred the second one so that's what we went with


Here are the final versions:



I'm extremely pleased with how they came out. They look good on the web and will also perform well on business cards, print brochures and so on. Their simplicity makes them very easy to recognize and the strong colors attract the eye.

Hopefully some of you have found this pictorial interesting and informative. I encourage everyone to leave design to designers. This work is not that expensive and having it done professionally makes all the difference. You don't know Photoshop as well as you think you do! Using Visibone to pick your colors isn't going to cut it. Get it done right the first time so it doesn't need to be done again later.

Check back soon for my next article, which will document the process Mike and me are going through now to design the page template for the UserScape website.

Microsoft Opens Office Formats

Big news in the MS world. Scoble reports that Microsoft has released the schema to it's Office 2003 format, meaning in theory you should be able to create Office documents from other applications and have the work perfectly in Office. This is something I've bumped my head on alot in my career, trying to build docs from scripting languages. If this is all true and actually works it's going to be a very good day for programmers everywhere.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/29.html#a9275

http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/default.mspx

Its All About the Marketing

It's not about features anymore -- it's about geek jewelry: "The non-Apple side of the world isn't even playing the same game."

(Via The Scobleizer Weblog.)

- Is Scoble the only person outside the Apple "family circle of trust" who gets this? This is huge. I totally agree that it has zero, nothing, nada to do with features. Heck USB drives are 5 years old. The difference is that this is sold by Apple, called an iPod, and has white headphones. That's it. It's fantastic marketing. Apple has literally pulled off a Coup d'état on the mainstream consumer electronic industry. There stock is going through the roof because of it. It's not just that they're making money now, but apple has won the hearts and minds of the youth. It's high school kids and young professionals who are propelling this movement and those people will be Apple customers for years to come. It's kind of funny that just when geeks thought it was all about the features it turns out it's all about the marketing.

you dont trade sammy sosa for jerry harriston jr….

you dont trade sammy sosa for jerry harriston jr....: "you dont trade sammy sosa for jerry harriston jr. i dont care how much money you'll save.
"

(Via tonypierce.com + busblog.)

- If you've never read Tony you should check him out. He's not work safe and he's pretty much crazy, but he's very entertaining.
-----

Spam Update: HashCash Works

Since Jan 17th when I installed the WP HashCash spam plugin, I've had 238 attempted spams and 0 have been successful.

Powerbook G5

" Is the PowerBook G5 near at hand?" (via The Register)

Auschwitz Liberation Marked

Bloggies Are Stupid

Come on, give me a break. Maybe it wouldn't be soooo stupid if they just had a few well thought out categories. I'm OK with weblog of the year, best design, that type of thing. "Lifetime Achievement", "Best Non-Weblog Content of a Weblog Site" huh?, "Best Meme"!!!!!!!

Give me a break.

Stratellites Go To South America

GlobeTel announced today that it has signed a contract to provide Stratellites throughout South America, starting with Lima, Peru. This is big news as I believe its the first contract requiring the actual delivery and service of a Stratellite.

GlobeTel up .03 (23%) Yippee

UPDATE:

This has become a very popular post. If you have comments on GTEL or other stocks I'm trying to move this conversation over to BestAsk.net. So let's continue there!

I appear to be one of the only weblogs covering GTEL and there's been alot of pointers over here from various forums and so on, so I suppose I'll continue my coverage at least while things are in motion. We were up 23% today, if anyone knows why please leave a comment! Can't really figure it out, but there was huge volume of 47,000,000 shares. Everyone who got in a .09 can't start smiling now

GTEL Up 17% So Far Today

GTEL is up 17% through mid day on very high volumes. I haven't really found any news that would indicate what's going on, but I like it!

Comment Subscription Added

Due to popular demand, I've added comment subscription via email using the Scriptygoddes Plugin. Seems to be working. Enjoy!

Dear Google, Please Don’t Build a Browser

Steve Rubel points out that Google has hired a developer off the Firefox team. This is once again increasing speculation that Google is building a browser.

As someone who develops web based applications for a living I live in fear of this day. I don't care what Google is building I just hope and pray that it's not a browser. I really don't think I can take another browser. What's that you say? It's based on Mozilla so that's good you say? Hogwash.

Netscape, Firefox, and Camino are all based on Mozilla. Guess what, they each have their own quirks as it is. Now add GBrowser, plus IE 5, IE5.5, IE6, IE6 SP2, AOL Browser, and Safari. Now your talking real money in testing and development. Sure if they all followed the specs it wouldn't matter, but they don't and they won't so adding more won't make anything better.

So please Google don't build a browser and in the meantime maybe Scoble + Firefox + talk of a Google browser will be enough to wakeup Microsoft and get them going on IE again before the market crumbles into total disarray.

Geek Drinks the Kool Aid

Geek News Central "So as the alarm clock rang at 4:30 am on a Saturday I got out of bed pissed off about how stupid could a company be for only having limited quantities on an official release day and went to the store. Sure enough 5 other people were already their and the earliest arriving person had shown up at 2. Of course they all had power books out and were chatting away about stuff I have never heard of. So when the discussion moved to me I talked about podcasting and some other subjects avoiding the fact that I was a hard core Windows user that was getting ready to drink the Kool Aid and have the wrath of my readership pound me to pieces." - Heh. That's about the 10th story I've read about Windows users taking this opportunity to get a cheap mac. It will be interesting to see how all this shakes out in terms of market share. Will the mini actually eat into wintel market share or will the majority of people buying it not actually be "switching" but instead going dual platform and using both?


Update: Another story over on cnet with the write keeping the mini in addition to his IBM " I'm not going to trade my IBM laptop for a headless Mac, either"

Dare on nofollow

A Look at Some of the Negative Feedback on rel="nofollow": "I don't see this is an abuse of the tag, I see it as fixing a bug in Google's PageRank algorithm."

(Via Dare Obasanjo's WebLog.)

- I guess I still don't understand why WE have to fix their algorithm. Can't they figure out what the spam is? Even if this does fix it somewhat I continue to think that it won't make a difference. When the cost is 0 there's just no motivation to stop spamming.

Podcasting Metrics - A Strawman (via Blogarithms)

Podcasting Metrics - A Strawman: "If we’re going to attracts advertisers, sponsors and undewriters to our podcasts, we’re going to have to give them statistics, preferably audited. And if we all use the same metrics we’ll be able to educate media buyers more quickly and accelerate their decision making.


Just to get the discussion moving, I’ve posted some thoughts on how podcasters might measure and report their listenership on the IT Conversations wiki. Feel free to add your ideas or comment on mine."

(Via Blogarithms.)

-----

Secure RSS Feeds :-(

Alex King runs up against something I've been thinking alot about as well, which is the best way to secure RSS feeds. The help desk software I'm working on will support receiving inbound requests and tracking a specific request via RSS. I believe this is an essential feature as well as a great product differentiator. That said, it's really hard to secure them and that's big trouble.

Alex was using HTTP Authentication (and I suppose will still support that) but is now also going to offer username/password security via the URL. Both have pretty big issues. HTTP Auth works well and is supported by most major feed readers however PHP must be setup to handle it and sometimes it isn't (usually when PHP is run as a CGI because it does not receive the proper headers to do basic authentication).

Passing the users username and password via the feed URL gets around this but then exposes the full login info of the user to the entire world (an will be logged in most web server logs as well). It also has the nasty side effect that every time you change your password you need to change your feed URL.

I've considered both options, but the big problem for me with #1 is that HelpSpot will need to run on windows and PHP on windows is usually setup as a CGI. As for #2 I can't get past the idea of having someones password in the URL.

So what I'm currently considering is using a dual approach with basic authentication and tokens. If the platform the user is on supports basic auth then this will be used (hopefully with SSL to actually make it secure). If not we'll use a token approach.

This is where each user gets a token assigned to them (perhaps a hash of their password). This token is then appended to the feed URL an acts as the identifier so /rssfeed.php?token=4342lzjklei398a56dek78bes. You get the idea. This is then unique and very hard to guess, though still easy to copy and pass around to you friends. In fact this is only security by obscurity, but it's better than no RSS at all and may be enough for some installations.

Of course if the organization wants total security they'll be an option to disable RSS feeds altogether.

Sometimes You Have to Wonder Who’s Winning

(Metro buses block an intersection in Washington DC as the city is locked down for the presidential inauguration, January 20, 2005.)

nofollow Won’t Work

I have to say that I'm amazed that this radical method was so quickly adopted by so many large companies. I guess they felt like they had to do something and this is one of the few things they control that they could do, but I don't think it's going to work. JD has alot of what I'm thinking in his post so I won't cover all that just go read it there.

The main issue for me is that this has essentially been tried in the email world and failed. Here the deterrent is that you won't get pagerank. In email the deterrent is that your mail won't get through because of Spam filters. Just about every person using email on earth now has at least one spam filter running, but guess what? I still get hundreds of email spams a day. Why would they keep trying if they know they can't get through???

Oh yeah because it's FREE. Spam filters just like nofollow doesn't address the real issue which is that as long as there is no cost to spamming me a million times a day they will. Since their cost is zero they will continue to spam and perhaps even more so than before in order to get wider coverage into sites without nofollow or to get actual clickthroughs on sites that do have nofollow and at the end of the day I still have to have some type of spam filters because they're going to spam me and even if they don't get pagerank I don't want their links on my site.

The solution is as it's always been, micropayments. I would pay a penny to every blog I post comments on, no problem. It would be nothing to me because that's 100 comments for $1 plus I'd be getting payments back when people post to me so I'd probably break even or at least be close. The spammer on the other hand would now be totally screwed. Indiscriminate spamming would now be a very costly en devour and therefor at least limit their activity to only the most vulnerable or valuable targets.

More Good News For GlobeTel

GlobeTel announced today a new letter of intent with NASA to provide them with access to Stratellite technology. This is big. I've very bullish on GTEL and signing a deal with NASA is going to give them alot of credibility with other organizations.