Barcamp Bangalore 9 (‘BCB9’) is happening on 18-Sep-2010. They are conducting a logo competition. I was brainstorming for a logo idea.

‘Talk of the town’
Much later, from the phrase ‘talk of the town,’ I came up with the above logo. Base of the design is a ‘9’ in Century Gothic font. The appearance of ’9′ is changed so that it looks like a single quotation mark that represents ‘communication.’

A speech bubble is incorporated into the design that contains the BarCamp logo. The placement of the elements is manipulated in such a way that ‘Bangalore’ on the logo is speaking about BarCamp. Clearly ‘the talk of the town!’

Following is an attempt on the branding of BCB9. Click on the images for a larger view.

An earlier version

This option with a green tint and a different placement, size of elements is later replaced with the current version.

Update on 13-Sep-2010

The results of BCB9 logo competition are announced today and I didn’t win. Thanks to all the people who voted for my design.

And, congratulations to Soujanya Sreenath, the winner!

Update on 21-Sep-2010: BarCamp Kerala 9 — BCK9

BarCamp Kerala Edition 9 is happening on 14-Nov-2010 at Amrita Campus, Karunagapally. Thanks to the organizers of BCK9, they adopted a reworked version of this BCB9 logo.

BCK9 Logo

BCK9 Wallpaper (1200×900)
Click on the image to download the wallpaper.

Photograph Credits

1. ‘Billboard’ by Asif Akbar
2. ‘Auto rickshaws on the way to Mysore’ by Matthew Logelin
3. ‘Hand tag’ by Marcelo Silva

Softwares: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator
Design date:
Ver.0.9 BCB9 — 12-Aug-2010
Ver.1.0 BCB9 — 20-Aug-2010
Ver.2.0 BCK9 — 21-Sep-2010

Design Brief
The design brief was simple: The logo should look like a house sparrow.

Ideation
I gave three options for the logo.
The logo given above is an artistic monogram that directly shows an association with knowledge. The logotype is cursive (running writing/joint writing) and looks as if written by hand. This logo is a direct communication of the themes ‘rare knowledge’ and ‘human touch.’

A silhouette of sparrow is used as the logo. The name ‘Gubbi’ appears on the body. The dot of the alphabet ‘i’ is placed such that it also represents the eye of the bird. This logo clearly says that Gubbi = Common house sparrow.

The sparrow is made of three overlapping pieces of brown cellophane sheets. An egg shape can be seen on its body formed by the overlap. This ‘egg’ represents an idea that is going to hatch. The font for ‘Gubbi Labs’ is free flowing without any sharp corners. It appears that the bird is perched on the alphabets ‘bb’ of ‘Gubbi.’ This logo directly communicates the central themes of ‘genesis’ of an idea and ‘futuristic’ solutions.

Refined Concept
We can clearly identify a pelican from its silhouette. But a sparrow does not have a unique shape that clearly tells that it is a sparrow. A silhouette of a sparrow just communicates that it is a bird.

Photo courtesy: Sudhira

So the client asked me to put a one to one mapping of the colors of a sparrow to the logo.

Final Logo

The logo represents a male sparrow perched on the ‘bb’s of ‘Gubbi.’ Bauhausm Medium is the font used in the design.
I really liked the outcome. Any comments? The space below is all yours.

Software: Photoshop, Illustrator
Design Date: 01-Feb-2010

Frankly, it is not easy. The beauty of a design is very subjective. When you work with a client, the thrill lies in figuring out a design that appeals to him. The challenge is to satisfy the client with the least iteration of the design.

Requirements
When you are your own customer, well, everything gets tough. After a lot of brainstorming, the constraints that we set for our logo are:

1. The logo should be fitted into a square. This ensures that we can easily make a 16X16 pixels favicon.
2. The logo should be simple. Otherwise, the details may be lost while it is sized down and used in applications like business cards.
3. It should be dynamic – a sense of movement should be there.
4. The number of colors should be a maximum of three. It should not lose its identity when printed in greyscale.
5. Only basic colors need to be considered.

From initial sketches to the final version

We decided to represent ‘antzFx’ by the letters ‘a,’ ‘f’ and ‘x.’ The logo should have elements of these letters.
As you know, this is our new logo.

The design was entirely created in Adobe Illustrator. This logo satisfies all the requirements set by us.

Animation
We are planning to do an animated version of this logo. The idea is to show a bright sunny day, blue sky and a vast expanse of grass land full of waves caused by the breeze. Occasionally, in the breeze, some petals of red flowers fly across the screen from right to left. Then the camera proceeds to a tight shot of a couple of grass blades heaving towards the left in the wind. These blades soon morph into the green part of our logo. A flying red petal freezes and forms the red speck on the logo.

Do you like the idea?
Yes, sure, we will let you know when we make this.

Software: Adobe Illustrator
Design date: 14-Mar-2009

Error 404: File not found

This is what we get when we type in an incorrect website address or when we click an out-dated bookmark. But it seems that somebody has figured out how to lighten the situation by customizing the classic 404 page. Some of them are delightfully hilarious. A huge collection of them is published by SmashingMagazine. See this, this and this.

Our attempt on 404
In our website antzFx.com, we have implemented a customized 404 page. You can have a look at it by clicking here or by typing ‘i_like_mixed_fruit_jam’ or any other message after the ‘antzfx.com/’ in the address bar.

This is our node to the age old ‘help Chotu rabbit to find his way to the carrots’ puzzle. You are in a dead end of the maze with a ‘You are here!’ signage. We are offering a way out by instructing the visitors to click on any other links provided on this page.
What do you think of our design? Post your comments below.

Why 404? Why not 007?
404 is an HTTP status code. For a normal web page, the status is 200 OK. HTTP status codes were established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1992, as a part of the HTTP 0.9 spec. The first 4 indicates a client error. The server is saying that you’ve done something wrong, such as misspell the URL or request a page which is no longer there. The middle 0 refers to a general syntax error. This could indicate a spelling mistake. The last 4 just indicates the specific error in the group of 40x, which also includes 400: Bad Request, 401: Unauthorized, etc.
Read more interesting facts here at 404lab.

How did we do it?
Simple. Added a line in ‘.htaccess’ file in our webserver instructing a redirection to the customized page when an error 404 occurs.
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.antzfx.com/custom_page.htm
More information is available at PageResource.

Softwares: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe DreamWeaver
Design date: 21-Mar-2009

404 Research Lab featured our website’s 404 page as “404 of the Week.” It is filed under the title ‘instructive 404,’ obviously referring to this blog on how we did it. We received a rating of 3.2 out of 5.0. Thank you for voting!

Fab404.com is a collection of fabulous, funny, creative, and weird 404 error pages. On 24-Jul-2009, they featured our website’s 404 page along with a description of “This 404 error page is a-maze-ing.” It is filed under the category ‘Funny.’ Thank you guys!

Bluefaqs is a design blog maintained by Shawn Ramsey. antzFx 404 is listed in the blog entry ’60 Unique 404 Error Pages.’

Now, a happy news
Barcamp Bangalore 8 (also known as ‘BCB8’) is happening on 7th and 8th of March 2009. As usual, they organised a logo competition.  After 25 days of online voting, I am fortunate to get 27 votes from netizens and emerged as the winner.
This ‘Mobius’ logo (Ver.2.1) is selected as the official logo of BCB8. What follows now is a detailed description about its evolution.

The ‘Mirror’ Work
Out of some five doodle concepts in my notebook, I selected two. The first one is ‘Mirror.’
When we mirror an uppercase ‘B,’ it resembles the numeral ‘8.’ This idea materialised into the above logo (Ver.1.0).

After uploading this logo in the Barcamp website, I received some comments regarding the absence of the city name ‘Bangalore’ from the logo. I changed the mirrored ‘barcamp’ into a mirrored ‘bangalore.’ Another comment was about the remotely placed Barcamp logo. So, the barcamp logo is brought to the centre and served as the background for the mirrored ‘B’ or ‘8.’
Barcamp officials did not select this logo (Ver.1.1). The reason for this may be the difficulty in including such a big logo in T-shirts. Steiner is the font used in the ‘Mirror’ design.

The Matrix connection
By some strange reason, the film ‘The Matrix’ was featured in Barcamp Bangalore webpage about BCB8 when the competition was announced. That prompted me to use ‘NEO experience’ as the tagline.

It is ‘Mobius;’ not Morpheus
An influence of Mobius Strip is there in this second design that finally got selected. The way it coils to form an ‘8’ adds to the purpose. To get the feel of italics font, a tweaking of 10 degrees is given to all the elements including the Barcamp logo. The following is Ver.1.0 of the logo.
As discussed earlier, ‘Bangalore’ was added to the logo.  The modified logo is shown below (Ver.1.1).
More comments followed and the curious looking ‘b’ and ‘p’ alphabets are reverted to the normal font. The Mobius ‘8’ is positioned at the centre encircling the alphabet ‘c.’ The ‘sidelined’ barcamp logo is also shifted to the centre to allude a symmetry. The modified logo is shown below (Ver.2.0).
The final iteration came when I was asked to drop the ‘Neo Experience’ tagline as it can be misleading. This version (2.1) is now declared as the official BCB8 Logo. Yanone Kaffeesatz is the font used in this ‘Mobius’ design.

Photoshop or Illustrator?
Mobius Ver.2.1 is entirely created in Adobe Illustrator while all the other versions are in Adobe Photoshop. Why? I am much faster in Photoshop than Illustrator. So the conversion of an ‘itching’ doodle idea into soft copy is easier in Photoshop. Once an idea is finalized and the final product needs to be delivered for printing, vector format (read as Adobe Illustrator) is the best bet. GIMP comes handy in changing the PNG image sizes to make small badges for the event publicity.

Glimpses of the Event

Day 2 of BCB8 (08-Mar-2009); Photo courtesy: fullFx

Flash back
I tried my luck at BCB7 some months back, but I didn’t win. You may read the related blog post here.

Sign off
We would like to dedicate this achievement to all the people who commented or criticized our work and thus helped to improve. Thank you, the BCB8 people!

Softwares: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, GIMP
Design dates:
Ver.1.0 — 04-Feb-2009
Ver.1.1 — 23-Feb-2009
Ver.2.0 — 24-Feb-2009
Ver.2.1 — 28-Feb-2009