Designing a Logo

I recently kicked off a 99designs contest for a new logo: https://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/logo-brand-ai-engineering-podcast-help-define-industry-1307842/

I found that responding quickly to submissions helped the artists turn around new variations quickly and that was mutually beneficial, as of course was narrowing down the brief on a single concept (for us, the VAE instead of generic space logos).

here are design considerations we found we wanted:

• Colors: good contrast on light and black bg.
  • blues work ok (maybe can add a pink-orange as secondary color, so it pops)
  • Another option is test in full grayscale for final logo - good logos should be visible without colors too
• Wordmark:
  • Suggest the words to be separate from logo (than integrated within)! Important for logo hygiene eg as favicons, esp when displayed against other company logos!
  • text-based logos are also a separate category on their own (eg Anthropic, Amazon), and can be super strong without a visual too
• Sublogos: a logo within the logo that can but extracted for a minimalist logo
• Simplicity: drawable on whiteboard (pictionary test)
• other smaller likes: gradients, feels modern, timeless
• Composition
  • better logos should fit well within a square/round shape - or at least 4:3 or 3:2 ratio - compact and looks better as merch / for general typesetting (eg banners)
  • Visual weight for top 6 needs to work on balancing line weights — eg fattening the skinny tapers, and recoloring the middle layers, or reshaping the length so it’s not too Marvel / comic book like — though if that’s the look you guys like then feel free to !  🤔
  • I’m thinking more along polished & clean / visually light > chonky & unwieldy, but that’s more of industry default which doesn’t need to be a constraint.
• Contexts:
  • on swag
  • large printed physical banner
  • digital banner,
  • small round youtube/twitter pfp
  • larger video/youtube intro

thanks

thanks to Yee Hui for most of these guidelines!