After a few days, Mike Rundle emailed me the following response.
Hey Jonathan-
Thanks for the inquiry about the 9rules logo, Paul sent your email over to me so maybe I could answer some of your questions :)
The original goal with the 9r logo was to give the organic sense of a growing community, so I chose the concept of many leaves coming from one stem to show the organic part, and then made the leaves larger as you go from bottom to top to give the sense that they are a living, breathing part of the logo.
As for the color choices, 9rules has a ton of different members talking about all different topics so I wanted to visually represent the diversification of our members within the mark itself. I chose many different colors to show the different types of members, and I happen to like green because of the obvious leaf association :)
Let me know if there’s anything I can answer Jon, thanks again.
Best,
Mike
My initial logo design looked cool, but was virtually meaningless, which makes “just cool” not good enough. Thanks to Mike’s excellent response, I’m further on the road to understanding how to better design logos.
Oh, and while I’m talking about logos, some may be interested in learning how Fedora created its new logo. Good stuff there.
So, does anyone else have any tips or resources on designing logos? If so, please share them!
I’ll make to a logo if you want, Jona. I’m pretty sure I could come up with something that fit you, your style, and the message. Say hell yeah, and I make it happen.
November 15th, 2005 at 4:06 pm
I appreciate the offer, Mike, but I would feel better if I created the logo myself as it is for my own personal site. I’m sure you understand.
November 15th, 2005 at 4:31 pm
Excellent post! Thanks for sharing that email. I guess I’m less creative than I want to admit — I’ve never spent that much time/effort to put meaning behind a logo (or much else for that matter). It’s changed my perspective about the *small* things that can sometimes be overlooked.
November 16th, 2005 at 8:35 am
My problems with logos are that I can construct them on paper nicely, but when I make them digital they lose what little grace they once had…
November 16th, 2005 at 3:20 pm
That’s cool Jona. If you have any questions let me know. I offered becuase I have experience with it. Such as, when you make your master, make it about 2000px in any direction (not kidding). You see, it’s not just a creative thing, if it was just that I wouldn’t even have offered, but logo creation is actually quite involved unless you want to 1) get stuck having to change it down the road once it’s established (I was going to focus on something that’ll have some longevity) and 2) find out you didn’t prepare it right from the start becuase multimedia wasn’t considered. Start with print considerations, before web, even if it’ll be used primarily on the web.
Your blog was down today and I fleshed out a good idea for you. Glad I didn’t act on it before reading this.
November 17th, 2005 at 5:42 pm
Mike, there’s obviously a lot I could learn from you in the area of logo development, so while I prefer to create the logo myself, I will definitely be communicating with you on both technicalities and creativity. (It’d really be a shame to let your good idea go to waste, you know.)
November 17th, 2005 at 8:28 pm
Very cool, Jona. Primary thing is to make it for print first which is why it must be HUGE in web sizes.
November 18th, 2005 at 9:30 am
Just try and make :) you will find creative on your side, thanks for share
November 27th, 2005 at 11:49 pm