One last try at a logo (I hope!)

As mentioned in this previous post, I’m attempting to come up with a logo and/or banner for I.N.K., a group blog written by nonfiction children’s book authors. The previous ideas posted on I.N.K. are here.

It turned out to be a big learning experience, the main lesson being “simplify!” I kept wanting to imply a sequence of events and/or add too much information. Also, in looking at a lot of author and book-related logos, the pen/ink bottle imagery is quite the cliché and pretty old-fashioned. In this day and age of word-processing and PDFs, maybe some other metaphor would be better.

The other surprising-to-me bit of information is that some of the bloggers didn’t want the logo to be “kid-like.” Not too babyish I get, but not kid-like? Maybe those terms mean the same thing in some people’s minds... whatever! It demonstrates not only the difficulty of working with a group on a project like this, but also the limitations of doing things by email.

Anyway, I’d prefer the logo to be kid-like, definitely, but not over the top with cutesyness. I went with “printed pages” as the concept, with differing fonts to represent the diversity of bloggers. The bright colors invoke youthful vitality and will show up well even at a small “button” size on a web page.
I’ve already received some comments that it’s not anything like the previously posted ideas, and some people liked one or the other of those. Hey, they were too elaborate and I like this one! The multi-colored one, that is. I did this version below for the more visually conservative. But I hope nobody votes for it, secretly. (Guess it’s not a secret now!)

However, there are other contending ideas from another talented artist. So, who knows what the logo will be in the end? The I.N.K. bloggers are voting in the next day or two, so we’ll see what happens.