Frectally speaking

As I mentioned as this year began, this year of 2013 is one of changes for me.
One of those changes is the move to focus on some key challenges via frectal Ltd. This is a company I set up some time ago and have recently moved to Dublin, Ireland.

Most companies have a logo that says something about themselves and so earlier this year I ran a design competition to design the logo for frectal.
When exploring how to get help with a logo I naturally hit the net to uncover great design skills. Assuming I’d use a local design shop I was quickly surprised and interested to find options in virtual design shops online, such as 99Designs, DesignCrowd and CrowdSpring. I wasn’t expecting them.
Yet these sites offer the option to run design competitions for logos, business cards, websites, etc etc from wherever you are, working with folk all over the world, wherever they are. The approach was intriguing enough that it had to be tried. So for little/no risk I began the process with 99Designs.

As an advocate of User Centred Design, I had some clear ideas of what I was after and was keen to lead the design process myself.

The Design Brief was indeed brief, i.e.

“I am keen to incorporate 2 elements in this logo design
No 1 is the Golden Spiral shape
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_spiral
No 2 is a clean/simple font for the brandname,
(perhaps something like an old typewriter font)
http://www.identifont.com/similar?BOQ

To construct the golden spiral shape
I’m looking for the letters from the word frectal
f r e c t a l
..using the clean font..
..to be arranged so that they make up the golden spiral shape
and the same font to be used to have the word frectal underneath the logo

So the logo would consist of
1. spiral shape on top , using the letters from the name frectal
2. brandname frectal underneath”

The rationale for this design was related to the
–frectal is a play on the word fractal,
–fractals are patterns seen all over the complex world around us.
-perhaps the most famous fractal relates to the famous “fibonacci sequence” and its “Golden Spiral“

Thereafter the competition began and lasted for one week.

In that time I was fortunate enough to have 123 entries from 19 Designers.

Key to this agile development process was regular, ongoing communication between myself and the designers, ie 157 comments over and back over the course of the week.
As the design evolved the number of designers that stayed in the competition dropped off, so in the end I was working collaboratively with a small number of my preferred designers.

This whole collaborative process of refining and refining the design I wanted was the essence of agile and iterative development and felt very productive from my perspective.
In the end of the process, the effort and help I received was so useful that I was very happy to award both a first and second prize.

So here now is the frectal logo, a story of design and collaboration!