The goal was to create a logo that was memorable, represented the paper distribution concept and showed a sense of community and connectedness. I also wanted it to be simple and smart, since I am a firm believer that less is more.

It also had to work well in various sizes, since it was to be used as the site’s favicon, newsletters, business cards, and other propaganda.

Phase 2: Sketching and visual brainstorming

Sketching is an extremely important step of any design process. It helps to get your ideas down quickly and without attention to unnecessary detail in the beginning. Below, you can see where the final logo was starting to take form in the sketches:

Phase 3: Bringing the above ideas to the computer

Once I had some groundwork to pull from, I opened up Illustrator and did some “computer sketching”, playing around with various combinations and more ideas. Notice below that some of the ideas steered away from the initial goal, but sometimes turning another direction gets you back on the correct path — Guess that’s why it’s called a creative “process”

Phase 4: Narrowing it down

Most of the time I find myself going back to repeat phases 2 and 3 before narrowing my ideas down to two or three choices. This phase is usually the point where I start playing around with variations and typefaces of the ideas from phase 3.

Phase 5: The decision

The decision of the logo at this point was not tough to make, I choose the single hand holding/giving paper. I felt it had more of a suggestion of distribution. It connected back to the goal of portraying a sense of community and personality with the actual hand giving paper. What do you think?