Logo for Blog CrustyBytes.com
a logo project by DB

Creative brief

Logo Needed for CrustyBytes.com

Context:
Logo needed for personal blog called “CrustyBytes” or “Crusty Bytes”, to reside at www.crustybytes.com . Topics will range between business trends and technology, strongly oriented to the future. It is a personal blog, not a company. By day, I do management consulting and IT executive stuff, described over at www.donbain.com . The blog may be seen by my potential consulting clients.

Needs:

I need a blog logo to place on every page, at the top, 99% of time. There is a 1% chance it will go on a calling card.
‘Crusty’ was chosen to evoke:
1. [90%] the image of good, warm stuff inside after you get past the hard parts (think fresh French bread, roasted marshmallow, lobster – but I am not necessarily attached to a food metaphor)
2. [10%] rough in manner or word.
‘Bytes’ chosen as a tech play on bites as in food or sound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundbite ).

Logo will appear on and must work with a white background. Logo Color palette has not been chosen but my tastes go to rich colors for text such as #990033 (deep red) (slightly preferred) or #3300FF (blue).

I prefer modern, clean fonts such as Arial and blog text will [most likely] be Arial. Regarding the image, I prefer a light icon or sketch, and would even consider a cartoon-like look.

Design should recommend whether CrustyBytes is one word, or two. Whatever font or letter style you recommend, I would like to have my initials, db (lowercase), in same style to use as signature or tag.

Target Audience:

Target readers are 30- and 40- something tech and business people, with occasional professor, VC or reporter stopping by. Typical reader will be relatively new to web 2.0 and the trends discussed. Probably more males in the audience than females – a pity for sure.

I like these designs:
Here are some things I like (with the comments or reasons why shown in parentheses):

http://www.cmp-rep.com/Kristina%20LOGO.jpg (light font with graphic; nice design on the word layout and )
http://www.kidswap.ca/blog/media/1/20080229-kid... (nice clean graphic that works with the word themes; too many colors for me)
http://www.sciencedev.com/images/logo_top.gif (lightweight graphics with clean font; colors are not rich enough for me)
http://springwise.com/ (nice font; don’t like white letters on dark background)
http://www.independencevisitorcenter.com/upload... (lightweight graphics nicely designed with words (did I mention I am in Philadelphia?))
http://www.wrensnestonline.com/blog/wp-content/... (use of an icon image)
http://www.euroskills.info/euroskills.nl/files/... (clean look on white background)
http://turnitin.com/research_site/images/logo.gif (works well on light background; potential for double meaning of words; light graphic with the words) http://frederatorblogs.com/random/files/2008/04... (very creative)
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/04/logo-desi... (lightweight graphic working with contextual meaning of the logo words)

Dislikes:

I do not care for script, frilly or heavy fonts. I do not like dark backgrounds and prefer lots of white space. Regarding the image, I do not care for a photo-based approach.