ion logo designs

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

One of the many parts in the creation of
ion was the designing of the look and
feel of the product.

We do very limited direct selling (we sell mostly online) and from
what I’ve seen, people just see the finishing and packaging of the ion
and instantly buy it. My understanding is that based on how the
product looks and feels, we assume that the same level of “attention
to detail” has been maintained even in the internals of the product.
In other words, “if it looks good, the product must work good”. Heck,
we even apply the same logic to boys and girls, we obviously go for
the good looking ones… must be something in the genes.

As I was saying, good look and feel increases the “sellability” of the
product as well as the desire of the customer to buy the product. It
so turned out that we were lucky to arrive at a combination of both
good packaging and a solid product (thanks to Vikram’s electronics
prowess).

We sought help from a friend Diwan
Babu (of Guru ColorTech) who did some
“amateur” designing for us and it came out really well. He made some
four designs (well, actually three since two are variations of the
same basic design):

All four were good designs, and we didn’t know how to choose between
them.

My view was that I didn’t like the black one because the long ‘i’
makes it look like ‘j’ and the red one was too bright. I was biased
towards the blue horizontal one, especially because I remembered what
Philip once
said:

“Light blue is a universally neutral colour in that all other
colours that exist are either offensive or have negative
connotations in some religion, or culture.”

We happened to be sitting in front of a Nike showroom thinking about
what to do, and this crazy idea of asking real people came up (okay, I
admit it was me who suggested it, but catching random people and
talking to them is not my thing, so those two did most of the hard
work). Several people, who tried to walk in to the store, were
bombarded by us asking about which logo they would prefer. Just to
make sure we were doing a proper survey, we changed the order of the
logos (so that they’re not biased towards the one in the center,
etc.), we asked people of different age groups, and so on.

It was a clear decision – the blue (horizontal) logo was going to be
the look of the ion.

After that, we used the blue logo as our basis to create many more
designs such as the posters, the
banner and the final box design:

It was “too blue” all the way, heh.