These are really great logo designs. I love the modern shapes and the ambiguity - perfectly in line with the ambiguity of using a field guide. I am getting feedback now from a range of people and will come back to you with suggestions, if I have any.
Would it be possible to try for a version of the logo involving just the #125 and #125 triangles. I think that those two are clearly the best of the 4 different triangle versions.
I am also wondering if they could be arranged so that they looked like they were the reflection in a pair of sunglasses or binoculars, not that the sunglasses themselves need to be made explicit. Do you think that is worth persuing?
Thanks for the new designs. I particularly appreciate your efforts to work with the sunglasses idea though all of the designs show potentially interesting ideas.
What I most like about #125 and #124 is that they are not obviously any particular animal. They could be a bird and a fish, but they could also be something quite different. Identifying them is not simple, just like in real life, where a field guide might be exactly what you need. Adding in the extra outlines etc. in the new images gets rid of a lot of that ambiguity, which I think is losing the real value of the previous versions of the logo design.
I do like the sunglasses version, but I think you could even lose the glasses frame, again making it a bit ambiguous what the pair of figures is. You could do one of two things:
1. use image #125 right beside the horizontally flipped version of #124. Then each "lens" is picking up and reflecting a different partial view of some intriguing creature.
2. think of image #125 as being a partial view of some whole creature and then think through what second partial view of some other part of that same creature would be reflected in the second "lens". That second partial view is what would be in the horizontally flipped image placed beside image #125.
To make the lenses a bit more like real glasses or binocular lenses, you might slightly rotate them so that their top sides slope gently toward the centre of the logo and the outer edges slopes upward and slightly outward.
Let me know if any of that does not make sense or you think it just plain would not work.
With regard to option 2 above, you could obtain the second lens by just recolouring entry #125 so that the colour palette ties in with the colour palette for image #125. That is sort of what you have done with the puffin image in #149 but that image is not "ambiguous" enough in my view. It is too clearly an identifiable species.
I like many of your new suggestions but, in particular, the four ambiguous beasties merging into eachother. I think that either that one or the simple triangular bird and fish images (on their own or together) are the logos that I most like. Now down to this end to figure out what will work best for the site.
Many thanks for the excellent logo designs that you put forward. It was a tough decision between the first and second ranked logos. In the end, the decision was driven by consideration of how the logos would integrate into the rest of the site design, as it is evolving.