Carsonified

We are happy to announce the start-ups who have been chosen to exhibit for free at our upcoming Future of Web Apps Expo:

1. MeeCard
2. Zebtab Ltd
3. Wakoopa
4. Yuuguu
5. WIDR
6. Second Brain

They will be joining an all star lineup of sponsors and exhibitors in the FOWA Expo Hall:

• Adobe
• Microsoft
• AOL
• XCalibre
• Huddle
• Zoho
• F5 Networks
• New Bamboo Web Development Ltd.
• KickApps
• Pluck
• Quintara
• Sun Microsystems
• MySQL AB
• ELC Technologies
• Zong

All expo only attendees will gain entrance to the Showcase track, and the Expo Floor presentations from these fine companies. If you can’t come for the full program, make plans to spend a day at the FOWA Expo, Oct 3-4 at ExCel London - it’s going to be fun.

By Elliot Jay Stocks

I’m going to be speaking at the ‘iDesign: design for life’ event next Tuesday (18th), and the organisers have given me two free tickets to offer as a competition prize. The event is part of the London Design Festival and focuses specifically on the digital world; details are here, here and here.

To enter the competition, simply leave a comment on this post on my site. That’s it! On Friday I’ll randomly pick two comments’ permalink IDs and and announce the winners on that post.

By the way, the prize includes the free ticket only (normal price £55) and no travel expenses or anything like that. For that reason, it probably only make sense for UK-based readers to apply (unless you’re feeling rich), but if you’d like to enter on behalf of a friend (for instance, you might live in the US but your friend is in the UK and able to attend), that’s absolutely fine - just leave their name in the comment.

by Ryan Carson

We’ve gotten quite a few comments in the last post that asking why we are “wasting so much” time creating an “umbrella brand”, so I’d like to address this point.

These comments seem to say that we should be spending our time and effort on our various different sites, instead of on a re-brand.

I whole heartedly disagree.

As a company, we’re growing and changing. The name ‘Carson Systems’ just doesn’t make sense for us. I chose it back when I was a PHP developer and all I thought I was going to do was build software. Now that we do web apps (DropSend and Amigo), online magazines (Vitamin), events (FOWA, FOWD, FOM, FOOA), and blogging (here), the name just doesn’t make any sense.

A re-brand is necessary so that people aren’t confused by our name. I’m sure you’re going to say that ‘Carsonified’ is no more enlightening that ‘Carson Systems’, however, it’s general enough that we have freedom to do whatever we want to do.

Another reason for the re-brand is so that we can start communicating to everyone that we’re behind all of these projects. You wouldn’t believe how many people I run into that say “Ohhhhh, I didn’t know you were behind XXXX”. It’s crazy. We’re obviously not doing a very good job of explaining that to people.

So by re-branding with a more general name and a great new logo, we can now start putting the Carsonified logo more prominently on all of our web properties. We think it’ll be fun to put things like ‘fully Carsonified’ prominently on our different web properties. It’ll help people understand who’s behind these projects.

Here’s a snippet from a recent comment by Brian Smith

‘Carsonified.com’ demands a tagline “because Carson.com was already taken.” There are probably hundreds of businesses with a name starting with ‘Carson’ the whole idea of trying to build a brand around such a common name is ridiculous.

Brian, what makes you think we’d want to be called ‘Carson’? I know it’s my last name, but isn’t that about the most boring name you’ve ever heard of for a company? This company is not about me. I’d like to say that again: This company is more than Ryan Carson.

As we said in the first post about this re-design, Gill and I didn’t even choose this name. The team did. That’s why I love it!

Another great thing about the name ‘Carsonified’ is that it’s an action. We’d like everything we do to be ‘Carsonified’. It’s the way we do business. Personal, friendly and quality. We think that it’ll be fun to say that our sites and events will be ‘fully Carsonified’, etc.

End of tirade :) I’ve gotta catch a plane to Edinburgh!

By Elliot Jay Stocks

Everyone liked the direction I started to explore with the ideas you can see at the end of the last post; the bolder, more immediate direction was starting to remain legible and recognisable at smaller sizes, and it was less ‘fussy’ than the more insignia-like ideas. However, a couple of the guys thought that the insignia idea hadn’t really been explored fully yet, so I returned to using a more prominent flourish and attempted to wrap the whole thing in a more visible ‘shape’.

I wanted to keep the decoration to a minimum because I felt that too much of it would simply push the logo towards something too antiquated; it was all about getting the balance right and evoking a sense of classic cool blended with forward-thinking modernity.

In an attempt to reference the ‘home-made’ approach, I carried forward the brush idea from the previous designs and I think this mix of the three elements - the modern type, the classic flourish, and the hand-made paint - has really started to form the strongest ideas so far.

Continue reading to check out the images. As always, you can see the full-size versions on our Flickr account.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Elliot Jay Stocks

Sorry for the shortage in blog posts recently, everyone; let me get you up to speed with the development of our new identity.

The insigia examples went down a treat and I think we all learnt a lot about the elements we wanted to include and those we wanted to avoid. In essence, we wanted to avoid the old fashioned, coat-of-arms kind of look. At the same time, we wanted the logo to appear modern without looking like we’re trying to be futuristic.

With the team hungry to see something bold, I returned to Illustrator and picked out a few font options I thought it might be worth pursuing. After narrowing down the fonts, I did a quick bit of kerning on each one and printed out a few copies. I then headed down to the river for a bit of quiet time away from the computer and began to sketch over the print-outs…

Read the rest of this entry »

By Elliot Jay Stocks

While we prepare the next post, we thought you might enjoy a light interlude of some more recent sketches. Click the images for their full-size versions.

General rough ideas.

Among other things, a study of the primary shapes that make up the coat of arms on our passports.

Drawn on the plane on the way home from Barcelona, a study of our hotel’s coat of arms, a strangely Roger Dean-esque idea of my own, and a prawn with ‘rark’, a fictional affliction that seems to befall many of the characters in my sketchbook. But that’s another story!

General rough ideas.

Some more studies (on the right) of other logos’ flourishes

I went to Spain on the lookout for insignia, and would you believe it: the hotel we stayed at had one! Stupidly, I managed to completely miss it until we were leaving and only managed to grab this card second before we headed out the door…

By Elliot Jay Stocks

The other day, I mentioned we’re going to go down a different route with the new logo. That’s not to say we don’t like the one that was developing so far; we just feel it would be sensible to explore as many avenues as possible before going with one idea. Basically, we’re going to return to the insignia idea, which I toyed with briefly before dismissing it as “too authoritative” (see the video in this post). I think I dismissed it too easily, and Ryan had some great reasons for pursuing the idea:

1. An insignia represents quality and the hand-drawn style will reitterate this sense of ‘craftmanship’.
2. Adaptability: We can choose interesting elements to include in the insignia that demonstrate a lot of our core values. We could even change these elements every year or so, just to freshen up the logo. We really like the idea of an ‘evolving’ logo to tie in with the nature of the medium in which we work: the web.
3. An insignia is classic and shows that we’re not going away. We take pride in our work and stand by it.
4. Fun: The various elements in the insignia could be witty or very slightly humorous. This should dispell any ’seriousness’ usually associated with an insignia.
5. We’re also going to experiment with the idea of a ‘full’ insigina for things like print pieces and a cutdown version that works well in a small size.

So with that in mind, I began a new line of research. Ryan and Gill, on holiday in Greece, had already been inspired by insignias they had seen on a restaurant wall. I found a few in Barceona too, but my main source of inspiration came from one of my all-time favourite books: Tres Logos (published by Die Gestalten Verlag), which I’ve enthused about before. In order to get everyone in the team talking about what they liked and disliked about insignias, I photographed about 90 logos of that ilk in the book and then made a basic web page with all of the photos and spaces for the team’s comments under each image.

The findings - now complete with the comments from our meeting - can be found here: carsonified.com/misc/insignia

What do you think?