The Creation of a Logo

Coming up with a name for this business was easy. 4th Floor Creative. (For more on that topic, visit the first ever blog post or the ‘company’ tab above.) Coming up with a logo for the company was not as easy. Well at least not for me.

Fortunately, I enlisted help.

During the process of launching 4th Floor Creative I learned there are many people and companies willing to help you with the logo process. You can crowd source, you can hire a design firm or you can turn to a trusted source who you know is wildly talented and will do a great job. I decided to go with option #3.

So I commissioned University of Cincinnati Design, Architecture, Art and Planning graduate Dan Phillips to tackle the 4th Floor Creative logo. Our conversation began before April 16th, but it got kicked into high gear on that evening, around 10:00 p.m. at my favorite local bar, the Gas Light Cafe.

The picture above is the drawing I made that evening. The logo on the website is what Dan transformed my napkin art into. Pretty neat, huh?

That is why Dan is a respected graphic artist and I stick to broadcasting and the management of 4th Floor Creative. Of course, it wasn’t as easy as sitting down at a computer to transform my napkin into an important logo. Dan presented me with seven pages of options during our round 1 evaluation. I looked them over many times, shared them with friends and colleagues and provided feedback.

Dan presented round 2. This presentation basically had two options. One we scrapped and the other one you see on this website. Fortunately, the overwhelming vote was for this one. I like it for many reasons, but primarily because it represents the four floors and also looks a bit like audio bars on a mixer board which pays homage to my early days as a radio announcer.

In the end, Dan did a great job and fortunately for everyone involved our logo is now much better than my late night Gas Light Cafe napkin art.

#LogoDesign #Beginning #Tom