First things first ladies and gentlemen, Happy New Year! I hope everyone's 2009 is manically awesome. We hope to be bringing you some great content as we navigate our way through this year and we hope you continue to join us on the ride!

I have made a video about this for From the Couch but I wanted to get it down on ‘paper’. Plus I haven’t done a proper post on We Are not Freelancers for a while and this is the perfect opportunity!

So let's get straight into the matter at hand. Our new logo for OBOX Design.

One year in thought

A lot of you may be wondering why we are ‘already’ changing the logo. OBOX has been around for almost six years now and we felt that the previous logo was a bit too cyber spacey for our liking. It needed to change and we knew it.

Actually we knew it for about a year.

Last year we were in a meeting with a client and while we were waiting for them I sketched this:

It was inspired by Carsonified’s logo and it just stuck in my mind for a very long time. I tried redoing the logo in about September last year but could not find a font which inspired me to make the change.

Taking the dive

During these December holidays I decided that now was the time to attack. I was relaxed in mind and body, there was no clutter from other projects and I had some time on my hands.

So I logged onto Veer.com which has some awesome cursive fonts that have a 1960 – 1980 sort of style. Upon typing in ‘cursive bold’ in the font search section I instantly found a font which I liked… a lot.

So without hesitation I bought it (it was only $30.00 and well worth it).

Refine, refine, refine

I talk about refining you design as often as I can and this was no different. Just because the font was awesome didn’t mean it was good to go. No, there was plenty to consider still.

I opened up Fireworks and got cracking with the refinement. I decided on ‘Obox Design’ instead of ‘OBOX Design’. I believe lower-case the choice was the correct one. I then realised that the ‘e’ and the ‘s’ in ‘Design’ did not flow like the rest of the font.

I then converted the font into a vector and worked on smoothing out the step between the ‘e’ and the ‘s’. The end result was a better logo, but there was still a long way to go…

Next up I had to decide on the layout of the logo. Was the ‘design’ going to be next to Obox or below it?

I decided it doesn’t matter. It will depend on the situation, if it goes below it will be right justified otherwise it will just stay next to ‘Obox’.

Launching it

So... I was happy and Marc was happy. Why not release it?

We did so by putting up on a temporary re-design of Obox-design.com and tweeted the launch of a new site and a new logo to the rest of the world.

The results were 50/50. We got a lot of responses saying the ‘X’ looked more like a ‘K’ (and to be honest it did a little bit). Basically people were not convinced at all.

With this feedback in mind I had two options:

1. Sulk, get stubborn, refuse to change the design despite what people said and reply with “Don’t worry you will get used to it”
2. Use this as the perfect opportunity to develop the logo through twitter with instant (and awesome) user feedback.

Dealing with the criticism

The choice was obvious, no 2 it would be.

I decided that I had to keep that ‘X’ in some shape or from. I didn’t want to use the old ‘X’ as it was the whole reason it felt cyber spacey.

The solution became obvious with progression. After taking a long look and studying why the ‘X’ looked like a ‘K’ I realised that the swish of the ‘X’ was on the wrong side. It should have been on the top left, not the bottom right.

So I flipped it round and moved the swish to the top. Straight away it looked a lot better but still not 100%, I called in my bro Marc and asked him what he thought. He suggested I tighten the X’s middle points. By bringing them in, the logo looked much more like Obox than Obok!

Finishing touches

I wasn’t finished though, there was one more thing to do. Usually I unify all the letters but this time I separated the 'X' from the rest of the logo and pasted it on top. I then added a drop shadow to all the letters and I believe the end result is perfect.

After that I made a video about it for From the Couch and since then there has been a much better response!

So that was my process, what is yours?

• A sketch one year ago
• Font purchase
• Refining the font
• Launching
• Dealing with criticism
• Doing something about it
• Re-launching it
• Blogging about it

I hope you found this informative. I would love to hear your thoughts on our process and the new logo!

You can read part 2 of our new Logo Design here.