Blog.ge Logo

I don't know about others, but for me working on a logo is a real pain in the buttocks. This pain gets especially strong with corporate logos, which usually need to be approved by a whole bunch of people with different tastes and opinions. A classic example for me was the Eurasia Partnership logo for its South Caucasus office, which I made a couple of years ago. It had to be approved by three different offices: Georgian, Azerbaijani and Armenian. The two months of intensive work went to pot, when the Armenian office rejected the final version, because the mountains in the logo reminded them of Mount Ararat viewed from the Turkish side. So we spent another month on tuning that element, frustrating me to the point when I was ready to leave the project.

Luckily, this time everything went a lot smoother. There were some frictions in the beginning, but it's inevitable on early stages of development, until the things begin to boil down. As soon as we defined the main direction, it was only a matter of polishing the discrete elements, which is not that hard, if you see the ultimate goal clearly. And we started to see that goal as early as in the third demo, but I was dissatisfied with the font, which seemed too hackneyed to me.

So we kept on searching. Our project lead offered an alternative font named Babycakes, which I also disliked at first -- I thought it was too childish. But when I actually used it in a demo, I clearly saw that it suited our concept better.

We were generally satisfied with the result, but there were still quite a few improvements to be done. The first thing was enlarging the capital letter. Originally we intended it to be small, but the project lead insisted otherwise -- she wanted to emphasize the letter B, so that the word "blog" dominated over the ".ge" part. It turned out to be the right decision, so now we had to find the color. I was shifting towards the blue version, since it's one of my favorite colors, but the project lead was inflexible in this matter -- she wanted it to be pink. How can you deny a lady such a request? Now we had both shape and color, and were almost done.

Almost, because there was still one thing left to do: our "Pink Lady" desired a glossy "Web 2.0" finish, and she was absolutely right about it -- it would bring an ultimate "candy" feel to the final product, which was exactly what the doctor ordered. A few additional tweaks and we were finally there!

Our brand-new sweet shiny candybar of a logo was all ready to set sail, and the only thing left to do was an appropriate favicon. I shipped them both and waved goodbye with tears in my eyes... Well, not really... but it sounds so melodramatic, I just couldn't resist. The beta version of Blog.ge already sports the new logo and the favicon, so you can see them both in action. As I was told, the new logo was a huge success -- especially in female population. I don't know about that, but I'm really glad it all finished without bloodshed.

That's it. Below is an example of one of the earlier rejected demos, just to show you what we went through at the early stages of development.