I have a new logo!!
It all started a few weeks ago when I decided to make a photography book on Raja Ampat. I am still working on that book, by the way, and will save the story about that for another post in the future. Anyway, I had chosen most of the photos for my book, and then started to work on the cover of the book. I soon realized I didn’t have a good logo for “Last Flight Out Photography”. You know, it’s always cool to put your logo on the cover of a book to promote yourself. So, I put the book aside, and started researching the best way to have a logo made. I came across this company called, Design Crowd . It is really cool. I wrote up what I wanted to have done, and Design Crowd sends out the request to designers all over the world who submit their ideas and compete for a contract. Within hours of my request I had over 50 designs sent to me from places like Pakistan, India, Philippines, Micronesia, The US, Indonesia, and several other places. In a week’s time, I had over 185 designs sent to me. You can comment on the designs, and have the graphic artists make changes and submit new ideas. It is incredible but overwhelming!! With so many fantastic designs, I had a terrible time deciding which I liked best.
I took screen shots of my top 10, and posted them on Facebook to see if my friends could help me out. I was thinking there would be a couple that stood out and got most of the votes. How wrong I was. Votes were all over the place. Every design got several positive comments and votes. I ended back where I started. No decision. I drove my family absolutely crazy asking them which they liked better. I couldn’t even get consensus with my own family. My daughter liked this one, my other daughter like that one, my wife liked a different one. I would settle on a design that I liked when a friend would write to me and talk me out of it or into another one. Oh my God, impossible to choose!!
The process through Design Crowd had time limits. I only had a few days to choose my winning designs, and once the designs are chosen, you have only a few days to request changes. Time was clicking away, and I had to make a decision. For a hundred bucks extra, you could choose two designs, and for another 100 bucks, you could choose a third one. I think you can guess what I did. Yes, I bought three designs. I couldn’t decide between three different logos, so I just bought all three of them. I had decided on some text I liked from one designer, and wanted to combine that text with one of the other “symbols” that I liked. I wanted a symbol that looked like a camera, that was unique, and one that you could clearly see “LFO”. I narrowed my choices down to three. I wanted the symbol to be used as a watermark on my prints…kind of my “signature” to the print. You know, branding!! I needed something cool and unique.
Below are the three symbols I had narrowed my choice to…
Many of my friends liked the middle symbol, and I liked it too. In fact, I liked all three VERY MUCH!! So, I placed each symbol at the bottom right of the same print (where my signature would normally go), and looked at each print to decide which logo looked the best as a “watermark”. The symbol on the left looked cool, but you can’t clearly see the letters “LFO” written, so I eliminated that one. The other two was really a toss-up, but in the end, the logo on the right looked the best on the print, so I chose it as my final logo. I think it is also very cleverly designed. Can you see the camera?? Hint: the “O” is the lens, and the red parts are both the side of the camera and also serves as a “focus spot”. Genius!!
So, combined with the text, you can see the front page of my website…I can also put the symbol to the left of the text to look like below…

Now, I need to put my new logo on my new book, and I can make some new name cards, and maybe even make some new t-shirts!! That would be cool!!