YC News Advice Needed: Logo redesigned | Hacker News Reader

YC News Advice Needed: Logo redesigned

streamfocus.com

3 pointsgibsonf127 comments

Based on previous YC comments and others, we've redesigned the logo and would appreciate your thoughts on it, good or bad. :)

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I think the typeface you used is pretty bad, and the line that comes out of the "o" seems unclean when it terminates on the left side; I would suggest you remove the line and dot altogether, and use a thicker, simpler font.

Also, and I mean this with the utmost respect for what you do, but those colors are hideously bad. The background is too bright and distracts from the content, and purple is just genuinely a washed out and hard-to-read color.

I was going to write that you should just hire a graphics designer so you can focus on your startup, but I think the biggest point is that you are targetting the wrong people.

We're asking for advice from as many areas as we can, but we tend to get great feedback here as the YCers tend to pay more attention to design than others. We probably will hire a graphic designer at some point, but its much cheaper to spend a few hours ourselves (and I am an architect with distinct ideas about design) than put our money in a graphic designer at the moment as we are bootstrappers. I think our next major expense will be lawyers.

(Before the edit, you had asked me to say what I thought was wrong, so since I already typed this list out, here it is.)

Again, please don't think I'm insulting your intelligence or programming skills when I critique it..

1) Way too big

2) Created in Photoshop or GIMP, which are for photo editing

3) By an amateur

4) No kerning adjustment has been made

5) Saved as a JPG instead of a GIF, with artifacts

6) Won't resize properly even if it was the perfect logo because it's not a vector image

7) You took both words and made them look like what each word is. As if 1-6 didn't make it look amateur already, this does it even more.

8) There is no ... what's the word I'm looking for.. cohesion between the meaning. I guess there is no... focus. Yes, there are lines connecting the two words but there is no cohesion between the meaning.

9) One color in an already amateur-looking logo signals the person is even more of an amateur.

10) The color was popular in 1997.

11) If not amateur, then it looks cheap and makes the company look cheap.

12) Not something you could fix.

13) The kerning issue, though already mentioned, keeps jumping out on me.

14) The bar by the S doesn't even go smoothly into the S.

15) The dot in the word Focus makes me feel like we're talking about contact lenses.

16) Why? Because you literally used no creativity and went with the gut instinct to choose a font that looks like the Focus-brand logo shown on Television (maybe subconsciously) without thinking about what it should look like in terms of a project management software. http://www.us.cibavision.com/lenses/focus_dailies/progressiv...

You should pay somebody with graphical design experience $50 to create any type of logo in 10 minutes.

It won't be so great you will use it all your life (though you might), but at the very least, I'm confident it won't look 'cheap' if the designer has any experience. Your goal here is not to spend $5,000 on a perfect logo... But some small amount on a logo that doesn't look CHEAP.

Thank you very much Vlad for taking the time to comment so thoroughly.

4. The kerning point is a good one - we'll work on that. 5. The original is photoshop text (scalable), but saved as jpg because the gif with transparency had terrible aliasing.

8. Hmm, this one I don't know how to respond to as you object to using meaning for the fonts. Facebook and Google, do they have cohesion between the meaning? 9. One color fonts are used a lot in logos. (Our prior version had 2 colors) 11. Cheap is definitely bad. 12. Hmm 13. The kerning is easy to fix 14. We are fixing that 15. ok 16. I had no idea about the focus-brand logo. The Ottawa font is my favorite font - I use it for all of my firm's correspondence. I found it in 1995 actually - it is beautiful and very easy to read. The font used for the Focus brand logo is quite different - definitely not as elegant as Ottawa.

Don't use purple unless you want a strong association with Sun Microsystems. The Favicon doesn't match the logo. The website looks like a weblog--that is not a good thing.

Honestly, there are a lot of problems with the site design. I am not a designer so I can't offer anything constructive. You need some professional help.

Thanks again Vlad - we've just completely redesigned the logo and its up now. Back to coding

Two examples of logos designed by successful companies with names made by joining two words:

http://microsoft.com http://facebook.com

Note how much effort has been put in differentiating the style of the two words. If you find good counterexamples, let me know.

Its a good point - and I've been thinking that my over symbolizing of the words may be the wrong approach. It's definitely important that the name of the company can be thought of as a single unit.

I'd even suggest changing the name to Streamfocus (lowercase f).

Another thing you won't be seeing much in good logos is graphic tricks embedded in the text. Zero is best, one is acceptable if it's well done, but best avoided if you're unsure. More than that and you're probably looking silly.

The only graphic addition in your logo that I don't fully dislike is the dot in the O, but it doesn't fit well there since the inner edge of the O is not round, but elliptical. If you want the dot you should change the O, and I don't think it's worth it.

My advice is: just pick a font you like, render the name in a program that does kerning and antialiasing right, and move on to other stuff. A logo won't turn corporate customers away by looking boring; looking cheap is the most serious danger.

[Edit: And I agree with vlad it's too big.]

I agree. You'd be better off just using a single typeface. Works for Apple.

We are finished now - one typeface but bold on stream with a subtle graphic. Back to coding :)

Thanks again - we've redesigned - but in the font we have, the small f looked terrible in the skewed forward position - so capital for now (I know thats a bad reason - but we have to get back to coding)

Your customers are boring people. You would be better served with a boring logo.

I didn't realize that saving 50% of your time while working so you can do things like start a start-up company in your spare time is boring. If that's boring, I'd love to see exciting :)

I don't know your business too well, but I would be really surprised if that was the motivation for your customers. Most business people are trying to improve productivity in their main business to improve their main business, not make time for a second business. Plus, why would somebody looking to start a startup spend money on expensive software--wouldn't they save their money to invest in the startup?

If the cost of our tool is reasonable and allows deploying faster with a better product, it would make good sense for a startup to use it. We use it of course.

I think its pretty good, I like the different fonts. The lead-in tail of the 'S' looks to have one or two more pixels then the actual lower part of the 'S'.

The 'O' - While it does look kinda like a nipple, it also is a designy(word?) way of a target, bullseye or focus point - so I get that and I like that.

Thanks - we'll fix that lead-in tail. Maybe having a slight "sexual" connotation for the women focused isn't such a bad thing? :)

We converted the tail into a subtle line that ends in the focus dot - sort of like a pan and click (on the focused item - which is part of our interface actually on the system)

I haven't seen the old logo, but this is what I think from seeing this current one.

- The dot in the "O" sort of looks like a nipple.

- I think both words should be in the same typeface. You could still italicize the first word or style it however. The extended "F" from Focus works well.

- The lead-in "tail" of the S (lead-in tail? does that make sense?) needs to be reworked so it fits in.

You're the second person to make the nipple comment - you definitely have your mind in the right place :)

For the typeface, I'm trying to hint at the meaning of the ideas with the words - which may be a mistake. The stream being more "fluid" and wider, the focus being precise. We'll try it with the same font to see how it looks too.

Good point on the lead in tail - that is a problem with the font - but I will definitely fix that.

Personally, I liked the wavy stream in the old logo better, but it's nothing I can justify; I just did. :~)

:) - that version was definitely more fun.

The reason for the change was to be a little less playful and a little more serious. The stream symbol on the old version was a meandering stream, now we have a fast stream - the idea being that our application helps you work a lot faster and smarter.

I have trouble envisioning a stream that is not slow and meandering. When a stream becomes fast, people stop calling it a stream.

Based on past feedback from YC news and others, we've redesigned the logo and would really appreciate your feedback good or bad :)

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34741

Thank you all for the great comments! What we have now is so much better than our earlier versions.

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