Qafoo got a logo
It's been a while since I blogged about the company Kore, Manuel and me are currently founding: Qafoo. In the meantime we made a public contest for our logo. The contest ended on Monday and we today elected a winner. Here we go with the official logo for Qafoo - passion for software quality:
Qafoo - passion for software qualityBy the way, as you might have noted from Kores blog entry announcing the logo contest, the Ninjas are out. Thanks for everybody's feedback regarding this idea. Our final tag line is passion for software quality.
As last, we founded Qafoo - passion for software quality. Please refer to our company site, if you want to hire me, especially for services around high quality PHP code.
The logo contest
So, why did we choose a public logo contest and how did that work?
Our motivation to make a contest was quite simple: We are all open source enthusiasts and follow the values of openness. In addition, we were not really convinced of the idea behind classical design companies. We expected two to three design drafts there, but not that variety one could expect from an open contest. Finally, we're just in the process of founding, so our marketing budget is not that big, yet.
As the platform for our contest we chose 12designers.com, which was recommended to me by a good friend from sixclicks. The system allows you to place almost arbitrary design contests. You define the price you are willing to pay, a deadline and your details, like what you expect and what the target audience is. After that, the 12designers team approves your contest and sends an announcement to all registered designers. These are more than 7000 people, as this blog post is written.
Now first designers start providing drafts to you. You can now rate the proposals in different categories like idea, suitability and style. Beside that, you can give written feedback to the designer, explaining what you like, what you dislike and why. As a result, designers will most probably provide new drafts, incorporating your ideas and working in the direction you define.
We were overwhelmed by the final number of 323 design drafts to choose from. There were really, really good approaches among these and the decision was therefore not easy. However, we finally had to make it and the result can be seen in this post. Read in the next section, why we chose this specific logo.
Making a decision
Making a decision among all the cool ideas was not easy. Luckily, we had one idea in mind, which already excluded many of the nice looking logos: We wanted a graphical element, which at least somehow reflects the ideas behind Qafoo. Beside that, we were lucky to have three quite different tastes of design, so that another bunch of logos were excluded due to any of us disliking it. In the end we had to choose between three different approaches and out favorite is:
Qafoo - passion for software qualityThe logo is simple, clean and uses a color scheme which we all like pretty much. It is somehow fancy, but not too fancy as the ninja idea was. The icon in it, looks on the one hand like the Q of Qafoo, on the other hand like a balloon, which we like as a metaphor for a consulting company. The simple dots in two different colors remind of a binary system, which is somehow geeky. Beside that, the icon can easily be used standalone and is easily scalable, even down to 5x5 pixel.
So, after this step is done, we can go on with getting a web design, business paper and other stuff. We are pretty sure to run more 12designers contests for this, after the amazing response to our first instance.
What do you say think about our logo? Comments are very welcome! :)
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