Ten Years of Logo Designs

January 25, 2007

When you are a small company you often have a lot of flexibility, sometimes too much flexibility when it comes to identity and logos. It's coming up on ten years in business under various forms of the Bitfoundry name. As I spent a bunch of time over the last month archiving old projects, I thought I would put together some of the various logo treatments I've done specifically for the company.

It started in 1997. Back then the company name was Bit Foundry Ltd, and the two most obvious representation of that name would be either the pouring of liquid metal or an architectural view of a foundry. I though the latter was the better choice, and it would give me an opportunity to create some imaginary art deco architecture. So, I fired up a copy of Lightwave and got to work. The end result just didn't work.

Prior to starting Bit Foundry, I worked at Metatec, a company whose primary business was CD-ROM duplication. At the same time there was a a multimedia and software development group that put out reference titles, the Nautilus CD-ROM magazine, and later a similar title for CompuServe. It seem natural to highlight that background and work on a logo that reflected multimedia. The result was great...until we found out how much business cards would cost.

That led to work on a single color logo, the idea now being a woodcut rendering of the art deco foundry from 1997. Printed on paper, the design looked great. The lines were crisp and really presented a professional image. Unfortunately, the same design looked terrible when it was reduced for display on the web. The lines would blend together and produce some interesting moire patterns. Expanding the size of the lines resulted in a logo that looked fine on the web, but lost its definition when printed.

In 2000, we had a hard deadline for a final logo for a project quickly due at the CD duplicator. With time short and all the effort directed towards putting out a bug free application, the simple typeface treatment became the logo of choice for the next six years.

In December of 2006, it was time to try again. Most of the pages were hidden behind a non-descript front page, accessible only to clients possessing the correct URL and password. The first item we decided to address was the logo situation. We took a look back and with the original deco foundry design in mind, took another crack at it. After a few sketches, the basic construction remained intact, but the geometry was simplified. To finish it off a background was added as well as a frame. The result was a simpler design that I really like, but would fit better if Bitfoundry was producing games or multimedia titles.

While we really liked that treatment, sometimes it's better to go with something a bit more abstract. Ideally it would be something that can be rendered in one color as easily as full-color.

Since most of what we do today is web development and design and if you are producing standards-based solutions, you are very much tied to the box model. From boxes to cubes, various combinations were constructed. The simplified version that is the logo today displays only the fully visible cubes and adds a background that helps make the logo stand out from the page.

We should be happy with this logo for a while... or at least a few weeks.