the village film

Today is, if you look at the calendar, the final day for voting on your favorite logo...and it should mean that we'd have an official logo soon. Except for one problem: our graphics people are not ready to move forward with ANY of the options currently available. They listed several problems with each attempt, and so I am going to try to sum up the issues:

1 - Too many reels. Our design people think the Film Reel is not immediately recognizable (most people have never seen one), which detracts from the impact of the logo.

2 - Too much tiny details/texture. Our graphics people say that modern logos are simple, and work well on any medium. Many of the logos submitted rely too heavily on details and textures, which won't translate well in one-color operations such as business cards and t-shirts.

3 - Too cliche / unimaginative. I had to agree when they pointed this out. We all pretty much put people and filmstrips (or reels) together with some text. Not that this is bad, but it just means we haven't really explored enough. Our graphics people feel we should try to incorporate the Internet aspect into the logo -- this project is cutting edge, its Web 2.0, and they feel the logo should reflect that somehow. Or at least we should explore it.

4 - Not enough LOGOS. This was also hard to hear, yet difficult to contest. Few of our logos actually implemented a good font choice for the Project Title with an accompanying logo (like McDonald's and the Golden Arches--the words and logo are separate, but look good together). They think we should definitely try this direction.

5 - Too Big. This sort of ties in with the "texture and detail" one, but it hits on something they wanted to emphasize. Our final logo needs to be able to work as a small printout, not only as a splash screen to a website. Also, our graphics team reminded me that a strong logo will fit into a square--not that it has to be a square, but that it will fit well within one (again, think the McDonald's "M", the General Electric "GE", the Shell Station's, well, Shell).

So thats the logo situation. I hope noone is offended. I personally think this is proof of concept for the last post I made (regarding the Philosophy). Every step of this project is completely open to input and suggestions and critiques, but we rely on the people that "know their stuff" to make final decisions based on the popular input.

Let's think more graphically, more representationally, and more simply. I'm looking forward to new submissions. We're gonna get this down. Send me new submissions at: villagefilm@gmail.com.