I am giving this design a layered look to differentiate between content (the purple background) and styling of text (much like the concept of CSS with the separation of content from presentation/layout) Also, the page curl gives a sense of managing multiple pages and content snippets, which is one of the bonuses of CMS systems. I would like to expand upon the concept of the pagecurl but your feedback is appreciated to guide me in the right direction. Thanks for your consideration!
I really like that you seem to have put more thought about what industry Contextual is in than many of the submissions thus far. The logo you came up with definitely shows an understanding of the CMS industry and I really like what you've done. The dog-eared corner and the 3D depth are very nice effects. I also like the slogan in italics and had planned on mentioning that to others in the general posts area for the contest.
Your design would fit right in with the CMS software industry vendors' logos - see OpenText.com, for example - and would stack up well, with just a little adjustment to the font used for CONTEXTUAL, I think.
What holds me back from pushing this one to the top of my rankings, though, is the following:
- 90-degree corners and traditional text font make it seem like a little bit of an older-school, corporate logo (this is good in some respects, but I was hoping for something a little bit more webby and fun/exciting.)
- The traditional aspect of it reminds me more of a (usually boring) product vendor (as mentioned above) and less of a (more exciting) consultancy vendor logo. I'm asking for a lot here, because I'm looking for something in between. Something serious enough to not be looked at as some flaky fly-by-night company with a bunch of snotty hackers with nose rings and tattoos working for it, while at the same time wanting to give the impression that while our team is professional, experienced, and really knows its stuff, that it's also working with the latest and greatest web technologies.
- The emphasis on the word 'TEXT' as you've done, also gives some connotations of being more from the world of 'Document Management' Solutions (DMS) more so than Web CMS solutions (DMS being more paper-based, with OCR scanning and print publishing - we don't really do that type of work.) But I also understand that by emphasizing the TEXT that it plays well with the dog-eared corner of the 'page' being turned up. Hmmm.
- Could you try a text font that is less traditional. Maybe if the text font was a) a little smaller and b) provided some more padding between letters to make things a little more airy, that might also make it seem a little more modern. Maybe go a little thinner on the font as well as the additional padding between letters.
Some thoughts:
Maybe just the letter 'C' could seem to be on its own layered white background page, with the turned up corner and the rest of the word using a white font (with tiny border) on dark background. This would allow the C to serve as a recognizable short-hand logo of its own for things like fancy custom bullets in bullet lists. I'm going to be making this same idea recommendation post in the general area and maybe to another designer in particular who has a design for a different contest (that wasn't used) that I thought would lend itself to this same approach - just to give you a heads-up, so you don't think people are copying your design later.
This approach is sort of similar what you see for online services who provide iPhone apps. Facebook's app icon is just its 'f', LinkedIn is just 'in'. Pandora is 'P', but with Pandora in text really tiny just below. It'd be great if the font used for Contextual was unique enough to be identifiable for such purposes, and I think having a C with a turned up corner and boxed by the page background would be quite unique!
#96-99: Thanks for the work on this. The new leading letter 'C' and the padding both worked out well.
I'd still like a change to the font. We're not really liking the 'War Games' computer monitor command shell font type so much. We seem to be trending toward more rounded fonts. Also, the 'A' in Contextual looks like an 'R' to some, when viewing the designs that are using the computer shell font type.
Along the way, I changed the slogan from Empowering Your Content to 'Empowering Content'. If you could incorporate that on the next revision.
I really like how the 'C' on a page worked out. If, when you try another font, it looks funny to tilt the 'C', I think it'd probably look fine for it to not be tilted, but it looks good currently.
The gold color seems to work well on the white background, but not as well on the reddish background.
I like the padding/spacing between the letters.
I wish I could give more input as to what to improve. I'm hoping that the font change will help. The 'ontextual' part is just a little too plain currently, and I'm still not convinced that the 'text' part needs to have any emphasis (i know that only one of the new designs has that), yet it'd be boring without the additional gold color. Hmmm.
#196 / #197 - I definitely like the rounded C in the icon better than the squared one in #96.
I really liked your idea of the turned up page corner. The overall logo is hard to keep from being more traditional, though, with the page graphic worked in. I really thought we were onto something here, but it was tough to combine that idea with a more modern look.
These last two designs are pretty darn good though. Still seem just a little plain, though. I'd need some additional accent color or something to jazz (sorry for the pun) it up a little.