Yesterday I introduced our company Wordsmith to you all (briefly) and then asked for feedback on our logo design...
The feedback was great!
Sorry, let me rephrase that...the feedback was useful, most of you thought our logo sucked!
And you know what...the people who commented were right!
Who knows what we were thinking trying to combine 20 different things into a logo!
We got a little bit too caught up in trying to be "clever" instead of designing a good logo!
Hopefully we learned a little from the feedback we received!
So here is the before (our original complicated logo) and after (hopefully cleaner while maintaining the "essence" of the original) based on the feedback given!
The old, over complicated logo
As per the feedback, there was too much going on!
The new, simpler logo
We got rid of the pencil and fountain pen feet.
We removed the thin line from above the logo as well!
We kept the idea of an anvil and combining the W and S in a stylised way.
However we slightly restyled the bottom to account for removing the feet.
And we decided to lean into the "smithing" (blacksmith) part of "wordsmith" more, as we think we can have a lot of fun with that (prepare for puns like "forging ahead", "steel yourself" and maybe even "riveting" articles! 🙄🤣)
As such we chose a stronger font, more industrial looking, and then modified it slightly to allow the "W" to be larger (while making sure the barbs sticking out of the side of each letter still aligned!)
See what you think now!
The power of feedback
As always many brains are better than one (or two).
People love to share their opinions and thoughts and offer value where they can (most people!).
I am thankful for the time that people took to comment and help in that post, I think we now have a logo that is "good enough" to work with for a while.
So if you are working on something, share it!
Ask for feedback.
Obviously you then have to work hard on filtering what is useful and what is not, but sometimes even just the prompts people provide are useful!
Did the feedback work?
I believe the feedback was valuable. But who knows if this is actually an improvement (I think it is obviously!)
So, to find out, same question as the last post!
Do you:
😍 think it is beautifully aligned, designed and refined?
🤮 hate it and really don't rate it!
Hopefully the feedback is a little more positive this time...but don't hold back if you hate it, I find that the most valuable feedback is the "negative" feedback!
Thanks for reading! I hope you have had (or are having) a great weekend, and I hope you have a fantastic week! 🚀
Top comments (20)
A big thank you to everyone who left feedback in the last article, in particular:
and a thank you to @polterguy for sharing their logo and favicon tip!
You all rock 🤘!
Hey! that looks astonishing, great job! 😄
Much appreciated and good luck on your new project!
Thanks Joel, as you can see the design rejig you did was more or less exactly what we went with!
Great minds think alike (I hope! 🤣)
Hahaha sure!
Definitely that looks better.
The community in tech in general is awesome. Most people are here for the love of technology itself, and thanks to that are more giving and helpful.
Thanks!
Yeah I think you are right, most developers love it for the tech and a large majority of those love it for the people they work with and the fun things we can do together!
I used this community as my "focus group" some few weeks back ago - Follow my profile to see the feedback I got - And my conclusion is that this place simply rocks! If I was to hire a 3rd party company to perform "the services" I arguably got for free here, I would have had to pay probably tens of thousands of dollars - Which of course for a small startup is out of reach ...
It's great to see others having realised the same as I did :)
It looks so much better now. Big fan of the minimalistic style. The only thing that kinda ruins it in my opinion is the test wordsmith at the bottom. It’s a good logo overall!
Yeah text is one of those funny ones, it is so hard to get a style that appeals to everyone.
With that being said, it is one of those situations where it is "good enough", I learned a long time ago that perfection is the enemy of progress.
I don't think it is the perfect font for us either to be honest, but I like it enough that it matches the concept (and the font is usable in a logo so that is the hardest part! Font licensing is a nightmare!).
But all noted and valuable feedback, glad you like the logo, who knows there may be a different font in the near future though 😁
Of course! I agree. There are always time for more improvements anyway. ;)
Exactly...1% better every day is the goal!
Once again thanks for the feedback! 🙏
I really like the logo, but the "wild west" font you're using for the brand name as small-caps leads to the capital having a thicker stroke width than the rest, which looks slightly unprofessional.
Ah great catch, yeah I just upscaled the W and didn't think about that! 🤦♂️
That is one that I will defo fix in the near future as it should hopefully just be an "inset path and re-add the barbs" job (he says with utter confidence that will probably turn out to be completely wrong 🤣).
And I didn't think about it but you are right, it is small caps style. I might be able to convert the font to work as small caps, which might make things more consistent when we build the actual site! On the list of possible things to do!
Thanks for that! 💪
It's a tiny little thing that probably won't even register until upscaled. Still, I think it's best to nail down all the details, so kudos for doing that.
I love it
Thank you so much!
🌀Glad I can help!
It's a lot stronger now
Much appreciated, well worth asking for feedback 💪!
Love the new logo; I didn't know how to speak about the previous incarnation but this iteration is less busy and still touches on the prior incarnation.
Thanks Leonid! 🙏
Glad that it still resembles an anvil as that was the hard part to balance!