I've spotted another reason to like #1. Alone among the contestants, it spells your name using lower-case letters. All the others use all-caps or small-caps, which makes a name marginally harder to read. The up-and-down variation in shape of lower-case letters makes words easier to distinguish, even at small sizes.
The font in #4 looks too similar to Scriptina to me and that's something every weekend warrior uses and makes the logo look generic. I like 1 the best.
Ian Ivey wrote:
There's one more thing to consider. I infer from the variety of colors that you did not indicate a color palette preference. Red is exciting, blue is cool, so you might be biased in favor of #3 just because of the respective designers' color choices. But if you aren't starting off with a specific color requirement, and if the designer of #1 can produce it with red (or orange or yellow) rather than blue, it might be interesting to see how it feels. I don't know whether that would be an improvement or not. But the industrial feel of #1 might be mitigated slightly by a different color choice. ...Show more →
Ian, thanks for your input. I asked the designer to swap out the blue with a few other colors and here is the result:
That's interesting. I'm not sure whether I like orange or blue better. I think yellow is spiffy against black background, but you may not want to lock yourself into a dark background like that. Orange might be a happy medium.
You've asked a bunch of photographers to (over)analyze your photography logo. The reaction you get here, almost by definition, would logically be biased toward the kinds of things other photographers tend to gravitate toward. I continue to favor #1 both because it's not a typical photographer's logo, and also because it's easy to see and read. That design also shows more typographical creativity than the other three (novice designers tend not to modify letterforms as much as this designer has).
The major problem with #1 is it looks more like KN, with the N at an angle. The W doesn't pop out. The only fix I see is to reduce the size of the W to fit and look correct.
gazzaf1 wrote:
The major problem with #1 is it looks more like KN, with the N at an angle. The W doesn't pop out. The only fix I see is to reduce the size of the W to fit and look correct.
That's only if you see a strong need to make the letters unmistakable, which I'd argue is counter-productive. It's not necessary to make the "w" obviously a "w" to every person who has never seen the logo. Most people who either know the brand or will see the logo in context won't have a problem understanding it. Those who glance at it and think it's an "n" without further investigation are irrelevant to him.
After spending some time seeing what each logo might look like in various applications I decided to go with the first one (but with the orange). The red square looked like it would work great with certain printed materials, but as a watermark it seemed to busy and hard to read. Also with it being such a strong logo in terms of color and the signature element, it felt like it was dominating everything including my photos.
The vertical version of first logo works great as a watermark even when transparent. I also like that this one seems to have some versatility in terms of being able to separate out certain components of the logo to be used throughout the brand. For example, I think that the text by itself would fit very well into the header of my existing site if I wanted to go that route, whereas the font used in the third logo wouldn't be nearly as compatible.
