Strategy LawLogo Design Contest

I thought it is importatnt to give some feedback to designers as a whole about my thinking in selecting the top 20 designs (so far) to help you know what is working for me and what is not quite hitting the mark.

My favourite logos are all non-obvious, about half are abstract and the other half use the words of the name (I should point out that I struggle to see how the firm initials help a logo to help people to remember the values of the firm). Crisp and clean and minimalist is good but I need to remind you that in contrast to most logos which are entirely about getting clients in the door, mine is about promoting my points of diffence to my staff (so they can make decisions that reflect them) and my referral partners (so they send me clients of theirs who will appreciate how we are different).

I will post a longer explanation of the values we want to be able to use the logo as a memory hook for in a separate post

I seem to be attracted to people who use colour cleverly perhaps subtle in the firm name and a little less subtle elsewhere and with a wider colour palette (though you're the colour experts not me so I'm looking forward to your expert advice and guidance- I probably hate clients who try to tell me how to do my job as much as you do). As a law firm, we fax and photocopy lots of our documents so the logo needs to be "black and white" friendly

I don't tend to like logos that are boxy, monolithic, or grey. You need to have something that couldn't be just any law firm as we consider our firm as one with unique valus and we actively aim to differentiate ourselves from our competitors (I'd prefer no logo to one that is a "just another law firm" logo). If you used intertwined initials you need to be aware of the medical/pharmaceutical drug industry logos as we want to avoid looking medical

I will try to comment on every logo submitted privately and look at your other work and comment on ones that I thought were brilliant (If I comment on a logo that has, for example, a hat in it, it doesn't mean I want you to give me a hat), .

A few of the designs seem not to have reflect the values we want people to remember about us so I've written this extended explanation of the five values (they are in weight order with the first three comprising the marjoity of the message to be conveyed)

1. CONVENIENCE (we go out of our way for our clients - theya re busy and we respect that, we have made a lot of making hosuecalls in our current branding but while we expect to continue to do all our work on client's offices and homes in the future don't want this to be a focus of the branding - our clients can give us what we need and reliably go on to focus on what they do so successfully while we work for their interests)
2. PROTECTION (we keep our clients out of court; we don't do court work because we like happy clients and are too busy with preventitive work to accept court cases which often come in unexpectedly with short time frames, large resource commitment and interfer withour ability to predictably deliver brillian legal protection strategies)
3. VALUE (we aim to be a high value law firm and provide high value legal work. we offer fixed fees that are cheaper than the CBD lawyers but more expensive than many law firms our size in the suburbs and then justify it by providing excellent expertise in our three areas of focus; educating our clients in how to use our work and what it means; providing ancilliary services such as negotiation advice, referrals to other experts introducing them to new ideas/books/audio material and sending them clients as part of our fixed fees)
4. PASSION (we love helping people to succeed and enjoy talking to successful people about how they do what they do. I am so proud of my clients and what they achieve every day and our work reflects that)
5 INNOVATION (we look for ideas to implement to improve our services. we're not affraid of being early adopters and being different. anything we can do to improve client results or staff happiness gets given a try - this is part of our effort to differentiate ourselves from other lawyers and stand out of the crowd)

Hi CH,

Just wanted to let you know that only the first 5 ranked can submit changes and new concepts in this contest format. You can rotate the designers, if you feel you want to see changes from any of us.

Thank you,
Andrei