I know we’ve been quiet for a while but things continue to happen, if slowly – thinking and discovery takes time. While we’re doing that thinking we’ve decided it’s time to invest in tools and branding. It’s not that a nice logo guarantees success, but we know from experience that people like to see a site that appears professionally done. We’ve got the name, now we need to figure out a logo. What should it be? We’re looking for suggestions. We thought about same take on a hand shake (too contractual feeling?), or some kind of yin/yang loop (too subtle?), or something to indicate an experiment (test tubes?). Any ideas on what it should be? If we can identify a few attributes we’ll run a contest on 99Designs to see what the creative people there can do.
Post any ideas as comments, and we’ll add notes as we think of things as well.
I do think that a handshake seems too contractual and mentoring itself is too well established for the experiment part to resonate too clearly with me but it does match with the name. When I think of mentoring I tend to think of a helping hand (going both directions which tied into a yin yang visual) and guiding from alongside. For something like this you won”t want something with much of a Big Brother Big Sister feel though.
Yin Yang seems a little too abstract, and perhaps not quite appropriate, the mentor (hopefully) isn”t shaping the mentee by being in opposition. Handshake might be ok, but I was thinking of it more as guidance, yes? So perhaps a sherpa? Why did you choose the image you did for the blog header? Seems to me that you”re using the image to visualize milestones (trees) along the path (the road, of course) of someone”s career (person walking is the mentee), making them a better…shepherd (left hand side – sheep, lol)
So guidance/assistance, course correction, a compass maybe? Lighthouse, something like that.
Mentoring sometimes gives a feeling of not being alone. Not that one is higher, or superior to another, rather someone to be there so that you are not flying solo. Two pairs of footprints, for example. Guidance, similar to GPS as the PP stated, compass-like, is certainly a good idea. Also, discovery. A logo depicting a discovery, maybe resembling the shine that gold in a treasure chest gives off. Not sure how to exemplify that here, but I”m sure you get my meaning.
How about a hand with a stylized person stepping off the hand onto a platform (like an olympic medal platform) – maybe with one or both arms raised in a sign of success….?