Logos

While building a web site for LaunchPad, I realized they didn’t have a logo. Their name and value proposition of accelerating the launch of new healthcare products drove the need for a logo that conveyed the notion of action, and power, and getting things off the ground quickly. I didn’t want to be too overt with a rocketship, but thought a stylized version of a rocket’s thrust pushing it away from the launchpad conveyed the power we were looking for.

Fun little logo I came up with for my son’s little league team.

Logo I designed for the Almaden Cabana Club, designed to invoke the impression of water and the sun.

Here’s the logo I designed for my son’s youth soccer team, in context of the game banner featuring the team’s players and sponsors.

Continuing the theme of designing logos for my son’s activities, this is a logo I came up with for his t-ball team. I actually suggested the “Stompers” name too, as the sponsor is a winery, and immediately had this idea for a logo.

This is the logo I designed for my son’s “circle” of the YMCA Adventure Guides program. At first I was worried about the prospect of designing a logo based on a rock, but I was relieved to find that cinnabar actually occurs as an attractive red crystal.

This is the logo I designed for a consultancy focused on the development of applications for mobile and embedded devices. The stylized D represents a mobile phone, like an iPhone or a Droid.

I designed these business cards for Comity. The design features a simple and straightforward layout, but the cards are distinctive thanks to a background based on an abstract version of the “bug” in their logo.

When she started her real estate business in 2002, Holly was apprehensive about incorporating holly leaves into her logo. She was afraid it would seem “christmasy” all year ’round. I made the case that she frequently introduced herself as “Holly…you know, like Christmas” so it was pretty unavoidable. Furthermore, I believed that the simple mark of green holly leaves with red berries would be attractive, distinctive, and easy to apply to all of her materials and signage. She agreed, and today her logo is recognized throughought Willow Glen and the South Bay.

Logo for a service designed to get leads for local businesses, called LeadWrangler, and shown in context of a graphic explaining the service’s value proposition.

Logo for an Internet startup specializing in search engine marketing for local businesses.

This is a high-level representation of TIBCO’s solution stack that I designed. It’s not a logo, but doesn’t fit into any of my other categories and I wanted to include it.

I have to admit it, I love this logo. I love how the intertwining “g” and “b” form a continuous path, giving it some motion and energy. More importantly, I like how the flow of the path is in from the left and straight out the top. To me the path through my initials says “If you put something (i.e. raw information) into “gb” he will turn it into something totally awesome (i.e. a brochure or web site) that will drive you to new levels of success.” The last thing I realized and now like about the intertwined g and b is how well they break off into their own little design — perfect for the icon you see in browser tab, and makes a nice pattern when tiled.

I surprised a lot of people in the TIBCO marketing department with this particular logo, specifically because of how it so prominently leveraged (bastardized?) the the blue element of the TIBCO corporate logo.  I had been TIBCO’s “brand cop” since before anybody else on the team even started working for TIBCO, and I’d rejected many different attempts to use or modify the blue square element of our logo. But this image popped into my head as soon as we started discussing the need for a logo for the program, everybody liked it, and I decided that this was an instance where bastardizing the logo for the sake of mother earth would be just fine.

This is the logo for TIBCO’s annual user conference, called TUCON. I creative directed it’s design, working with the talented designers at Michael Patrick Partners to come up with a logo that I actually really like. It’s a bold representation of the letters, but they are reversed out, open-ended for a bit of an “optical illusion” effect.

In all honesty, I can’t remember exactly what “Nextron Web Services” was, but I do remember using this logo in brochures and on collateral folders so I know it was real, whatever it was. As you can tell by the numerous brands I developed during my tenure at Nextron, we were launching new businesses and brands at a fairly frenetic pace.

When Nextron was getting ready to launch a new version of its core technology, which was essentially a rewrite, we decided to brand it as “NextStep” to play off the Nextron name and signify that this was more than just another new version of our software. I guess it wasn’t all that mind-blowing of an idea to incorporate a “step” into the logo, but I like it.

As part the service element of Nextron’s core business of mass producing small business web sites for yellow page publishers, the company employed a sizable staff of junior web designers and developers. Between that team and a few of us more experienced creative types plus a few programmers, we figured we could build high-end custom web sites too.

My friend Brian Ikeya and I from PCMCIA had at one point played around with the idea of starting a web development shop. We had come up with the name Global Impressions and secured the .com domain name, but never did anything with it. So when we started talking about a high-end web team at Nextron I proposed we take advantage of the unused name/domain and everybody loved it.

The logo I designed for this team, shown here, was a stylized capital G, with the end of the bottom curve forming a lowercase “i” dotted with a globe. The clean curves and gold metallic gradient were meant to convey a sleek, sexy, high-end feeling.

At some point during my time at Nextron, we decided to augment the Dev-Com business with a higher-end offering of dedicated server web hosting. We named the business AccuHost and I designed the logo shown here. It’s one of my favorites from back in the day.

Nextron had considerable bandwidth and infrastructure supporting its core business, and decided to expand its datacenter to support the hosting of third party web sites. So we came up with the brand and business Developer Community, abbreviated as Dev-Com. I directed the design of the logo shown here, the artist was a guy on my team named Greg Betz. The idea was that our service was a solid stable foundation for the awesome and engaging web sites that developers were building for their clients. It’s a little rough around the edges because this is a late but not final version.

This is the logo I designed for my fraternity’s 50th anniversary event. It was featured in invitations and on materials at the event itself. We even printed it on golf balls — that was my favorite placement. I wish I could find a bigger version of it, but you get the idea.

This is the logo I came up with for Holly. Granted, with no-brainer visuals like a holly leaf and picture of my lovely wife to work with I found it pretty easy to come up with something that was attractive, distinctive and memorable , but I’m pretty proud of it.

EasySite was a retail packaging of Nextron’s browser-based server-side web site building technology. The idea was that we’d sell these “kits” that consisted of a bunch of templates, and people would be able to build their own web sites. Easily. Get it? We wanted a lightweight logo that gave an impression of fun and simplicity, but nothing cartoonish or over the top because the target market was small business owners.

I oversaw the development and implementation of a new brand identity when IMV Internet became Nextron Communications.

I developed the logo and brand identity for PCMCIA shortly after it’s inception around 1990. The brand stood the test of time, and was in use until the organization was dissolved just a few years ago.