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Comment by michaelpinto | Hacker News Reader

This isn't how you should do branding. The point of branding should be to make your company, organization or in this case a blog stand out. Now if it doesn't matter what the logo looks like, then this is the way to go. However if you studied the rich history of editorial design you'd know that the yellow rectangle of National Geographic or the the bent page outline in red on the Time covers really made added to the personality of each brand. All of these "logos" look like something you've seen before; they've got second rate style but no substance; and sadly most of them look like they're for a cloud hosting service while the last one looks like it's for some vague non-profit for special kids.

Antonio do yourself a favor: Look at a dozen logos by Paul Rand, study the process behind them (Rand wrote several books) and then re-start your branding process.

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The branding you describe is orthogonal to what acangiano is trying to do here. When launching a minimum viable product, it's best to go with a logo from 99designs and a Wordpress/WooThemes/whatever template. Essentially a minimum level of professionalism while focusing on building the core product. Lest you think I'm alone in this recommendation, Patrick wrote a bit about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697558. Attempting to brand like Time magazine right out of the gate for a small project like this is absolutely the wrong choice.

If you're doing an endeavor which is designed for the communications medium (which is different than software) the brand is part of the product. And I'm assuming that this is a professional project, if it isn't then don't even bother with the branding and just start writing said blog.

I hear you and thank you for your feedback. I truly appreciate the value of branding and design, but this wasn't a random choice.

The reason why I went with 99designs, is that I'd like to avoid making a big investment upfront. Instead I'd like to build a minimum viable product (MVP) and use a "placeholder logo".

If the site manages to demonstrate its value and take off (perhaps despite its logo), then I'll be certainty more willing to invest in its branding and design by assigning the redesign to a professional firm.

It's a compromise, and not an uncommon one at that. But I fully understand if you consider it a mistake.

I also dont like the cloud logo only becuase it would make me ignore your blog if I saw it. Ie a negative connotation. In fact I think no logo is better a better starting point for a blog.

I dont even know what the techcrunch logo is.

In your situation I would start with "StartupDream" written in a legible but non-boring font and start working on content. People read a blog because of its content. So focus on content content content.

Branding is a lot like software development in this respect. You can go cut-rate and get something that fits the requirements, nothing more. What you end up missing is insight into aspects of the project you might not have considered, optimizations that, while not strictly necessary, can greatly improve the user experience, and the attention to scalability and future iteration you only get with a longer-term business relationship.

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