Avenue 25 (Revised from Fire Hydrant image)

First, are you arware that Avenue25.com is a future lingerie shoppe? You might want to consider this when choosing a name, for you might get people typing that instead of ave25.com. It might surprise someone when they're looking for your site and come across a picture of a girl's ass instead.

Your logo is weighted to the right side, because the symbol is larger than the word "Avenue" and so is the 25. Also, the "advertising & design" is competing with the name because of its size. It might be my personal opinion, but I also think it's competing because it is in the same font. I would adjust to a different font and a smaller size.

I think the stoplight was illustrated well, but I think the slim white lines suggesting highlighted edges will be lost at small sizes. I think that it relies on too many colours. Also, when sized down it looks more like a totem pole than a stoplight to me.

When I think of avenue or boulevard, I personally don't think of the stoplights that are on the street, but rather the green street signs. I very much liked the feel of your last logo concept, with an exception to the fire hydrant. This one definitely has a more modern feel, though.

------------
Perfectly Lost Designs
"…the Web design community is hopelessly distracted by technical fetish." ~Andy Rutledge

First, as they say, the good news:

I'm ever so happy to hear that the fire hydrant idea has bitten the dust. Also glad that the street sign idea didn't make it out of the coffee shop in one piece.

This one shows promise. I'm trying not to be influenced by the emotional impact of red (SHINY! ME WANT!). I'm thinking how cool the logo would look embossed. (Please don't let anyone talk you into spot varnish. Too Christmas-cardy.) And I'm thinking what fun to play, as you've already said, with stop/go/caution.

Now the bad news:

After you've exhausted the very few available plays on stop/go/caution, what else you got? If you want to play that game, you need to make sure you can make it to the playoffs without emptying your bench, dig?

Your ideas for collaterals, while catchy in the EXTREME, will be hell to print. If I need to tell you why, you need to grab a coupla lattes and head on over to your friendly neighborhood printer for a nice chit-chat about the realities of heavy ink coverage on letter-weight stock. And then let him tell you what your idea will add to Avenue 25's overhead. (You might want to have a little flask of whiskey in your hip pocket to get you over the shock of that part. I don't know about *you*, but lattes just don't hold that much punch for *me* any more.)

Will you ever need to run this logo grayscale, say in a trade publication or some other 1C medium? How do you think it will go over?

In 4C media, will the gradients in the relatively tiny lenses always work? Consider the impact of dot gain in most magazines, for example. You'd lose all that detail. So consider solids.

The trade show booth could be a knockout, if that's your thing.

And think what you could do with other roadway signage in the office: "DANGER: WO/MEN AT WORK" ... "STOP" ... "SPEED CHECKED BY RADAR" ... "SLIPPERY WHEN WET" -- in other words, a 12-year-old boy's dream bedroom, circa 1970. (Think Danny Partridge.) Could be fun. Or not. Only you and your colleagues can known that for sure.

And some final thoughts:

You've done a nice job matching font to angles in the traffic light. I think that will work. The silhouette of the traffic light itself is distinctive enough to not be mistaken for clip art. If nothing else, it could get you a few laughs at your local radio and TV station traffic departments. (And those people are always nice to humor.)

You might just want to nudge the traffic light down a bit to hit the baseline of the text on either side of it.

I'm eager to hear what others think, now that I've had my little say.

I feel like i want to see the stoplight in a few different fashions. Maybe that's just me. Maybe something abstract or something super literal like a photograph or something. I dont know, but this one in particular isn't really doing it for me. I feel like it could work - I like the font and such, but maybe it would be cool to see a few different ways of doing a stoplight?

Just a thought.