I'm working feverishly over the holidays to get my project, Bibdex, running on production legs. It's an online bibliography service meant for collecting and sharing references and notes.
http://www.bibdex.com
One of my personal goals for the project is to spend absolutely no money on it except for servers, domains, lawyers, and accountants. While seemingly insane, I wanted to do this project to learn the full 360 degrees of how to create and launch a web product so it could help me in my day career. No better way to learn than to just dive right in and do it yourself, eh? It's a slower process, but rewarding. (Also, I'm cheap.)
Here's an example of why it's valuable. Over the last year, I got pretty far except for the logo, which used to look like I drew it in MS Paint. In fact, the old one is still here: http://bibdex.com/images/logo.png . I was hunting around on BrandStack (http://www.brandstack.com) and LogoPond (http://www.logopond.com) and contemplating spending up to $1000 on a logo designer when I realized a common theme to all the logos I liked.
1. They all looked good in black and white because they were simple geometric forms.
2. They only had two elements that played off each other.
If you go through those two logo sites, you'll see what I mean. Complicated logos are worse. Logos by their nature are small, short attention span, high impact communication forms. Keep it simple and deliver the message through some tension.
I decided I'd try my hand at it, so after a few hours of sketches, I loaded up Paint Shop Pro (yes, PSP. I mentioned I'm cheap, right?) and drew the new logo myself. The constraints of simple geometric forms and limiting it to two concepts led to something I'm happy with: a book that is also a rocketship to demonstrate 'bibliographies in action'. Even if I ultimately find it an unsatisfying implementation, I like the core idea and can later hire a designer to redraw it.
So, what did you do this weekend?