Nathan @ 78th St needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 439 designs submitted by 64 freelance designers.
78th St (http://78th.st) and 78th St Steps (a sub-brand)
78th St is a startup company building web applications for companies that want consumer style solutions to common problems in small to medium enterprises.
We will be using a crowdsourced / highly outsourced model for idea generation, graphic design and web development. We listen to customer needs, but then build solutions better & simpler than they ever imagined.
We will be building a number of applications over time, and to be honest, we're not sure which ones will be successful. We want 78th St to represent a home for our diverse set of applications, a destination for daily use by customers and welcome a wide range of developing contributors to our project. It needs to be memorable & specific, but generic enough to support a diverse range of sub-brand applications. Examples may include 78th St Steps, 78th St Parking, 78th St General Store.
78th St - Banner brand representing our company, approach and suite.
78th St Steps - Specific application providing Facebook style features in an enterprise way. "Steps" is intended to represent a meeting place / people watching location. Many cities or streets have a nice set of steps where people gather to do these things. We are flexible on whether this is "78th St Steps", "Steps on 78th St", "Steps @ 78th St", etc. We need your ideas for how to have a variety of branded applications that feel like part of the same 78th St suite.
Our audience will be similar to those for 37signals (http://www.37signals.com), Google Apps (http://www.google.com/apps/), Xero (http://www.xero.com), Yammer (http://www.yammer.com), Salesforce.com (http://www.salesforce.com), Zoho (http://www.zoho.com).
Users of our applications will be anyone working in an enterprise and could range from recent graduates to "your mum". This reinforces our desire to sit at the cross section between the feeling of consumer applications, but be used in a business context.
Decision makers / buyers of our applications will be tech-savvy business users or forward thinking IT personnel in small to medium enterprises.
Our core requirements for the logo design are:
1. Provide a logo for 78th St AND a sub-brand logo for 78th St Steps. We need to see how the banner brand and sub-brand are related.
2. Include a hidden meaning or story, for example, the arrow in FedEx or the AtoZ in Amazon. We'd like our logo to represent crowdsourced development in some way. One example of this may be the old mosaic subway station signs in NYC - http://www.forgotten-ny.com/SUBWAYS…style.html. Please be creative here - we want your unique ideas & inspiration!
Submitted designs should also:
1. Use a horizontal design suitable as a web page logo.
2. Incorporate a style or feature that can be represented in a 16x16 icon form.
3. Please don't use stock images or clip art in the logo.
4. Provide original graphic files in both print and web formats to support changes & future subbrand development.
We will rate all submitted entries under the following star scoring scheme:
WINNER - Best overall
5 - Finalist & under consideration for the win
4 - Very close, small tweaks needed
3 - Good general direction, please try some similar things
2 - Please try something else
1 - Wrong direction or does not meet brief.
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