Logo for New Media Training site

We're launching a New/Social media membership-based training site called "Know How Cafe." It's a site were entrepreneurs, professionals, and business owners can learn about all aspects of web 2.0 and the social web. Members will learn how to be savvy users of Twitter, podcasting, flickr, linked in, facebook, etc. The site is not yet live since we need a logo to guide the design direction.

http://www.KnowHowCafe.com

There are lots of free applications and services on line that are great for business users. But knowing how to use them effectively is not easy for non-technical people. We've provided programming, development, and consulting services for 12 years to clients around the country. We're now taking all our experience and putting that into a single resource where members can learn what they want when they want. It will feature case studies, screen casts, webinars, forums, and more. We will program the functionality but do not yet have a design concept.

Members will be the leaders of their industries, the ones who want to be the smartest, fastest innovators, and who want to use the social web with savvy.

Based on the logo, we'll then design a complementary site around it and possibly come back to the winning designer for additional work on full-site color themes, callouts, details, etc.

We will also give the winning designer plenty of link love on our site as well.

- Professional creative style
- Primary colors: Blues or Greens or deep Purples
- If you have a color pallet that comes to mind, by all means express it. We tend to think professional colors run in the above ranges but plenty of companies use Reds and Oranges to great effect.
- Secondary colors: shades or tints of the primary
- Tertiary colors for links, callouts, rollovers ect can be more on the opposite side of the wheel to provide color balance and help with depth of the design
- Prefer a somewhat standard font (or font that is easy purchased and works on Macs) so variations, banners, badges, etc. are easy to create and reproduce.
- "Know How Cafe" or "KnowHow Cafe" or "KnowHowCafe.com" should be in logo
- Friendly, professional, conversational, web-based
- Logo graphic should convey a sense of "learning" or "teaching" for professional web-based communication and marketing.
- Logo should easily and clearly reduce in size and maintain readability
- Logo should reduce to grayscale and maintain readability and be easily recognized
- Prefer logo be as simple as possible while conveying the above items
- Prefer logo to fit comfortably in a square space. No really wide and really short formats. Difficult to place in banner ads and use as avatars on Social Media sites
- If a really strong idea comes to mind, but doesn't fit the criteria above, go for it!

- No kitchy or "trend of the day" designs.
- No garish or neon colors
- Prefer no pastel colors unless dusty shades or done very well
- No "coffee stain" circles - too obvious