One of the things I've noticed about people starting up businesses is that they love to work on the "fun" tasks of a new company before they do the really important things, such as focusing on the name of the business or project, printing business cards, buying a custom sign, etc.

The design of a company's logo is no different: designing a company logo is fun, it can make a person look sharp, and it will ultimately represent a firm to the rest of the world. And in this day and age the surface of a firm sometimes matters (often wrongly so) more than the substance. Sometimes, the name and logo becomes a huge ordeal...and the managers don't actually get around to building a business before the cash runs out. Heck, even the All-American Football League had a logo (and a draft) even as things went South...

So, I'm going to focus on "important tasks" right? Nada. Despite my little rant there, I'm a sucker for fun--and while reading Pro Drupal Development and Version Control with Subversion is a wealthy endeavor, they are boring the living crap out of me--so let's have some fun!

The current SCORE OS logo is weak and the colors of the site are boring. Why? Because the current logo was just a product of me learning Adobe Photoshop font effects (in my favorite bold, space-efficient font: Haettenschweiler) and layer blending options (gradients, drop shadows, etc) to make a little badge that looked halfway decent. The current colors are a deep green and black that I used for the Pre Pro Sports standard colors (#006600 to be exact), but SCORE OS needs its own shades, right? So now it's time to get a little more serious about our project's "look" and make the SCORE OS logo a bit more sexy. My first task is always to brainstorm, so I'm going to throw some thoughts up on the board add see what else follows...
 

SCORE OS is a sports-related project and fantasy sports are essentially leagues of fantasy teams that are derivatives of real leagues. Thus I want to first post, as an example, some of the logos of the top sports leagues.
 

The next set of images are related to the Drupal social publishing system and it's for-profit sister company Acquia. For those of you that don't know, Drupal stands for "drop," hence the raindrop icon.



Taking all of these images into mind, my initial thought is to change the SCORE OS color scheme to a red-white-blue variation and to use the frame of a raindrop as the icon. Then we'll just stick the project name next to the icon. Not too complicated, but we need something to "fill" the raindrop and it won't be a weak little yellow drop...I'm thinking maybe a star shape will do the trick.

Next in Part 2: We'll see if we get any feedback from our million+ readers and throw up a few sketches. Any opinions out there?



Note: The logos above are under license by the respective corporate bodies that created, own, and manage them and their presentation here does not reflect any type of endorsement by those firms.