So when the logo was first proposed I really liked it, and when I mentioned that to Susie she raised some of the objections that she presented here and after thinking about it for awhile, I have to admit that she has some valid points.
I was less concerned at first about whether or not the logo gave people an indication of what we’re about, I just wanted it to look cool. But I see the value in that. I did come up with a whole list of famous logos that give virtually no indication of what they’re about – Target, McDonald’s, Coke, Nike, Flickr, I could go on, but these are all household names, they’re major international companies with widespread appeal to the general public, as well as ones with big advertising budgets. We’re a highly specialized group of a type that most people don’t even know exists, and although people at stuff like PhillyBrickFest are gonna know what we’re about, we’re also interested in promoting ourselves to the general public at things like International Children’s Festival.
I got the ‘buildings as studs’ right away, but I also viewed in the context of knowing exactly what I was looking at and the group it was for (here’s where Susie would sarcasticly say ‘I thought it was just cause you’re smarter than everybody else’ and I would say ‘That too.’). If you showed the logo to random people on the street and said ‘What is this?’ they’re gonna say ‘It’s a bunch of skyscrapers’. They’re pretty much gonna be assuming that the SCLUG part is just on a cross-section of earth below the buildings. I think I can safely bet that not one single person would say ‘Oh yeah it’s totally a Lego brick with buildings as studs’.
So I’m a proponent of working a more obvious Lego brick into the logo. I don’t have to be a lawyer to know that as long as it doesn’t actually say Lego on it, we can pretty much do it.
I also agree that it needs to say Steel City LUG somewhere in the logo. I’m a big fan of the Steel City name (and it’s too late to change it now anyway), but the one drawback is that 99% of people are going to have South Carolina as their first guess for SCLUG. I don’t have a problem putting SCLUG on it in big letters as long as it still sez the full name at the bottom. I guess maybe I thought that was the plan, since this was just a prototype logo, but I would say start putting that in now so we get the full effect and can see what the spacing and font and whatnot is gonna look like.
I’m not entirely sure what ‘3D doesn’t transfer well to fabric’ means. You can transfer anything to fabric. I’m guessing it means that if it’s on a shirt, the lumpy nature of people’s bodies means the image gets distorted and you lose the 3D effect and it just looks like a mess.
I like the Pittsburgh buildings and I like the Gothamy style, but I have to admit that the bridge makes more sense. As a person not originally from here, I can tell you that all those cool buildings that are instantly recognizable to us are not known to anbyody outside southwest PA, unless they watch a lot of baseball on tv.
I hate to complain about free help too, but I’m guessing they knew their first effort might not be accepted as-is. I’ve never met RJ, hopefully he doesn’t already think I’m a bad person.
I haven’t viewed the webpage yet.
