My Lab’s New Logo

In order to put our best foot forward, I commissioned a new logo be designed by the fine folks at Hatchwise.  The idea is that you create a contest with a cash reward where graphic designers compete to design your logo/business cards/whatever.  Designers submit their ideas and after 10 days, you choose your favorite, at which point the winning designer gets the money you put on the line and you get lossless digital copies of your brand-new logo.  You can get quite a few submissions, several of which are usually quite good.

I put down a $150 reward (minimum is $100, although some go as high as $500) and my total cost was about $210 (for special highlighting and prominent placement in the current contests list, similar to eBay‘s system).  My contest in particular got 133 entries.  About 25% of those were revisions that I requested because I wasn’t happy with a particular version submitted.  That put the final number of unique entries around 100, and thus the cost somewhere around $2.10 per entry, which is ridiculously cheap for graphic design.  Many graphic design firms, for comparison, charge something like $200 for 4 designers to create 4 logos with up to 2 revisions each.  There is a little less assurance of quality here, but with a high enough award, you are practically guaranteed something will jump out at you.

In my case, there were about 5 final contenders to win and about 12 versions of the winning entry, the best of which I now dramatically reveal.

I chose it because of 1) the eye-catching color scheme, 2) the easy-to-grasp visual metaphor.  Technology (the circuitry) powers learning (the light bulb) and makes the gears turn (also a thinking metaphor).  Simple, straight to the point, and something you can grasp on first glance.

TNT Lab, by the way, stands for the “Technology iN Training Laboratory.”  Yes, it’s an acronym.  Yes, it uses a letter from the middle of a word.  But that’s par for the course.  Pretty soon, I’ll be launching the lab web page at tntlab.org, but we’re not quite there yet.  I’ll post again when things are fully up and running.