PiNEcalendars.com

is this an acronym? otherwise PINE without images of trees misses...

My comment#1 would be: There's no contrast. The logo disappears on the background. Increase the saturation of the the colours you use - in other words, skip the fade.

Comment#2: Is the company "Pine" or "Pine Calendars" or "Pine Calendars.com"? I suggest leaving the .com out of your name, it's kind of 2000s, and even though it might be an online company - DOTCOM just reminds too much of all those companies that didn't work.

Comment#3: There is no need to tell anybody, when they're visiting your website, what the website address is... it's in the address bar.

Comment#4: It's a nice concept - the whole MS Word calendar concept - but I think the logo needs some more thought. It really doesn't say much, or it says too much. If I had to thumbsuck what the logo means I would go for - Calendars are made from paper which is often made from pine pulp. Therefore the Pine in the name. The little coloured blocks remind me of post-it notes, which can be linked to the reminding qualities of calendars. But these two concepts would be so far removed that they don't belong in the same concept together.

Suggestion (Jokingly) How about a pine tree with Robinson Crusoe like notches on it - indicating a calendar on a pine tree. I would suggest a different font altogether. According to www.baddesignkills.com that "For safe results" you should always "Use a concept".

1. The observations about the lack of context for the name "PiNE" are all valid. Yes, PiNE is an acronym. It stands for for Post-it Notes Environ. The challenge was to come up with a shorthand name and an acronym provided the most brevity. So there is "a concept" but it's an acronym-based concept. The acronym is spelled out on page 2 and elsewhere in the website.

I couldn't figure out how to upload a screen shot of the home page. Viewing the home page may provide some of the context that is missing from viewing an acronym-based logo standing alone.

2. I understand what you mean by increasing the color saturation but I don't follow what you mean by eliminating the fade. What I posted is the logo created in Freehand before it was dropped into iWeb. Once imported into iWeb, I ratcheted up to the maximum saturation and contrast levels before it started to change the colors. The thumbnail you are viewing does not reflect this max saturation.

3. I originally tried the logo without the dot.com at the end and it made the word "Calendars" look too small and out of proportion next to the letters above it. As for making a font change, I welcome any suggestions. I tried a bunch of fonts but I'll go back and try a lot more.

I quite like the way that the text in 'PiNE' slightly overhangs those pine-like off cuts or post-it note samples.

Mintsause mentioned something about the colours fading into the background, and i guess that's just about the way i see it especially with the blue one right on the end. It almost looks grey, and then you've got the white background.

I was wondering, why use only four colours? Why not use seven, and in that way you give people more choice, and it may also give you more options to play around with as regards to your logo. For example, you could leave the 'i', 'N', and 'E' as they are and have a larger post-it-like note enclosing those letters and the 'Calendars.com' word underneath.

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1. The Blue color note at the end of the logo does read gray against the gray background of creativebits website. It reads "More Blue" in the website where its surrounded by white space.

2. The 4 color palette is at the core of the PiNE color-coding system. PiNE's interface is designed for summary presentation. The theory is that we can keep track of up to three things at a time. So we assign RGB and this leaves a fourth color, yellow, for headings. It's is less frequent that we need to compare more than 3 things at a time and PiNE's palette is expandable for this purpose.

3. As for choice,the color scheme is completely up to the user. By way of suggestion, we offer the PiNE original 4-pastel color palette, an expanded 8-color palette, a Contemporary Colors Palette and more are being added. The user has the entire color wheel to choose from in designing his or her own custom palette.

either pump up the colors of the boxes or choose a darker background color, whatever it is...just make it pop.

also..why is the N and E the same size as the i where the P is largest?...i would think that the P N and E share the same size while the i stays lowercase at the same type size.

also check your letterspacing...it could be done a lot better.

Adopting the above advice, here's version .b. I pumped up the saturation as far as I thought I could go and unified the spacing between the color notes. Clearly, the color notes are still too pale/recessive. There's a big drop off in saturation between what you see in FreeHand and what you see after its been uploaded to creativebits.org. Overall, the above advice widens the aspect ratio and lets in more white space in between. It lets the letters/color notes "breathe".

As for the letter size, I started with the "P" the same size as the "N" and "E" and the whole thing looked wimpy so I progessively enlarged the first letter until the yellow color note filled half of the hollow in the "P".

It's amazing what others can see but which eludes the original designer.

I've had another look at your website, and you're right - those pastel colours do stand out a whole lot more than they seem to on the submitted logo. I think the reason i didn't notice it at first was that the whole website looks a tad bit too bland.

I think the problem here is that the more one looks at this logo the more weird it appears to be. But, my first impression on seeing it was that it looked rather interesting, the kind of thing you might expect to see on Robin Good's MasterNewMedia.org website.

If i was going to change the way your logo looks i might either completely leave out the word Calendars.com or perhaps embellish it in some way. I was thinking along the lines of some kind of streamlined fairing.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents or tuppence.

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I would love to take you up on the suggestion to give the PiNEcalendars.com website more sophistication. The site could stand a high-tech look makeover.

Unfortunately, I'm constrained by a design objective. PiNE is analog instrumentation and the interface design is driven by instrumentation design. The interface has to err on the side of bland and recessive. The objective is to make the interface recede so that the data stands out.

So when you say find it "a tad bit too bland" that's great. A tad bit too bland = unobtrusive and PiNEcalendars.com strives to be unobtrusive.

On the name, I'm constrained from a e-commerce marketing perspective to go with a name that conveys all of the information needed to deliver folks to the website.

Hi Tim,

Took my time, but had a rethink.

It's not the font per sé. When you write PiNE that looks right. But in the Logo the NE is small caps. I think if you took it to normal caps, ie. like it is written PiNE it would make a measurable difference.

Tracking - the letters feel a little too far apart. On the calendar itself, the blocks seem close to each other, while in the logo the spaces are BIG. I think if you closed the space up a bit the logo would be tighter. And then, either align the "calendars.com" to the right, or full justify it to the width of PiNE. Just to create the "unit" feel, it feels a little loose at the moment.

On the website itself...

I'd move the logo right to the top, menu and "INTRODUCING-The BEST Back-To-School Calendar!" under that. In fact, the text content is really fighting for attention here. if it was possible to differentiate some more between the various copy areas it would make it easier to understand. The "INTRO...endar!" could probably be placed in another form. Maybe an actual "Post-it" looking effect with it handwritten on there. Something like that.

Seperate the "header" from the content. It's difficult to see where the important content actually starts, especially since the logo and the calendars are so similar.

It's not that it's impossible to understand, but a large percentage of "Graphic DESIGN" is the "ordering of information in logical and understandable portions."

Other than that, nice.

Francois de la Mintsauce
If it's not signed and sealed, it's not signed and sealed.

I was amazed to learn that you have taken the time to re-visit and re-analyze the logo.b. and the website home page. Thank you for sharing your insights, experience and expertise.

On the "NE" letters, they are full caps, not small caps. They were sized to let as much color as possible show through on the north and east sides of the background notes. I never thought of bumping up the "NE" to match the height of the "P" but I'm sure going to give it a try.

On tracking, it's interesting that you find the letters to be a little too far spaced apart as I've had the same impression. I can see that a slight reduction may tighten the overall look of the logo, literally and figuratively. I'll try lots of incremental changes to the tracking.

As for the positioning of "calendars.com", your point is also well taken. One suggestion above was to eliminate it altogether. That would be my preference IF PiNE was a household name. I'll take a shot at full justification. I think your point is that this logo lends itself to full symmetry. The problem is, lengthening "calendars.com" makes it more prominent when the aim is to emphasize the brand name, "PiNE".

As for moving the logo up to the header in home page, on the one hand I can see where it makes the home page easier to read. On the other hand, it deviates from the consistency of having the table of contents as the header. I will certainly try it to see how it looks. My concern is that the table of contents is going to look out of place anywhere other than as the header.

I particularly like your suggestion of changing the look of "Introducing..." phrase. This significantly reduces the clutter and increases the white space. More white space will make the logo stand out even more and may allow me to increase the size of the logo.

I have been planning to give the home page a new look for the upcoming 2007 calendar Christmas shopping season but I had no idea where to start. Mintsauce, you have provided a lot of great ideas. Now I can't wait to give them a try.

Displayed above is PiNEcalendars.com logo version .c based on the suggestions offered by Mintsauce above.

I raised the size of the letters and color notes and reduced the tracking slightly. This slightly reduces the aspect ratio.

On the positioning of "calendars.com" I tried a wide range of positions. It appears to be the most readable if "calendars.com" starts about midway in the width of the yellow color note. "calendars.com" is now larger and a shade of gray darker. I tried the "NE" larger but this hid the green and blue color notes.

The changes were minor but were made in every area. When the Before and After are viewed side by side, the improvement is very noticeable. The above advice sharpens the look of the PiNEcalendars.com logo. Thanks again, everyone for weighing in with your insights.