Alphabet Consulting : Logo Design

This is a project from September 2009 and the company, currently, no longer uses the final logo delivered to them. Read on for the complete evolution of the logo designed for Alphabet Consulting. Since it has been a long time since I worked on the project, I will refrain from commenting on details because I might not remember them factually.

The keywords gleaned from the creative brief and presented to the client.

These were the other logos that the client had liked, picked from Logopond.com and Logofi.com :

Following are the first set of sketches presented to the client.

Then a second round of sketching:

They picked about three ideas that they liked and the following color options were then presented :

Then there was a second round of color variations and other minor design iterations :

And a third round of color variations and other subtle design changes alongwith more typeface options and logo layout / placement options :

At this stage, the client zeroed in one design and the following variations in color, placement and typography were presented. The client was mostly in favor of Arial.

The client wanted to see how the logo could be presented on a dark background and with some further color variations and the following were presented to the client :

The following was the finalized logo :

After a couple of months, the client got back in touch with me to say that they would like to replace the previously finalized logo with another option that I had presented to them :

The situation got complicated when it was difficult to convince them for why I would charge more money for something I had already created – to keep it neutral, I decided to charge only for the final files, which would need to be created, hence I would bill them a fixed amount only for file-creation. Unfortunately, that was not acceptable to the client and the following logo, not designed by @asidebrands, is now in use.

In the past, I have tweeted from my @naina Twitter account about how work relationships can sour almost at the drop of a hat. I would prefer not to blame individuals and instead blame the awareness and understanding of design effort and professionalism as a whole. The belief that design solutions can be presented by anyone with a copy of the Adobe Photoshop / Illustrator software is so ingrained in India’s business culture that each time I have tried to reason with someone who comes from that uninformed place, their response has been within a hair’s breadth of outright ridicule toward my so-called naiveté.