But do you know who choreographed this song? The answer is Longinus Fernandes and his name is left out in the end credits of the film.

“There’s one guy I should mention, we’ve mentioned a lot of people, I forgot the guy who choreographed the dance at the end of the film, he’s called Longinus [Fernandes] and I forgot him off the credits, and I only found out about it two weeks ago. I’m an idiot… and I apologize from the bottom of my heart Longinus”.

This is how Danny Boyle made up with Longinus while receiving his Oscar for Best Direction.

Why I am saying this here? Because, like Longinus Fernandes, I also had an experience.

You know that I was unhappy over the fact that CyberPark Kozhikode is using my logo for some time without my knowledge. When I accidentally found this goof-up a month ago, I contacted the authorities and I was promised that they are working on a plan to recognize my success in the competition.

I am very happy to inform that CyberPark officials recognized me as the ‘Designer of CyberPark Logo.’

I was invited for the foundation stone laying ceremony of CyberPark Kozhikode on 17-May-2010. A memento was presented to me by Mr. Bhaskaran, Mayor of Kozhikode. A cash prize was given to me by Adv. P M A Salam, Member of Legislative Assembly from Kozhikode.

The CyberPark foundation stone laying ceremony was attended by Mr. V. S. Achuthanandan (Chief Minister of Kerala), Mr. Mullappally Ramachandran (The Union Minister of State for Home Affairs), Mr. Elamaram Kareem (Minister for Industries, Kerala), Mr. Binoy Viswam (Minister for Forest and Housing, Kerala) and other dignitaries.

I would like to thank Mr. Binu A Pazhoor (CEO, CyberPark Kozhikode), Mr. Thomas (TechnoPark, Trivandrum) and Mr. Vasudevan (TechnoPark, Trivandrum) for helping me out and inviting me for the foundation stone laying ceremony of CyberPark Kozhikode on 17-May-2010.

Dear Reader,

Thank you very much for all the prayers, support and comments.

Photos of Foundation Stone laying Ceremony of CyberPark

I was reading the newspaper ‘Malayala Manorama’ and trying to have an afternoon nap. On the ‘Opportunities’ page, I saw the following advertisement.

The logo looked very familiar. Then I realised – it is my own design! I designed this logo as a part of a competition organised by TechnoPark Trivandrum, some 18 months ago. Since then I have never heard from the authorities about the contest results or the fact that that my logo is being used by them for about a year.

This post is about the experience of designing a logo for CyberPark Kozhikode. CyberPark is a Government of Kerala organization planned in the lines of Technopark at Thiruvananthapuram and Infopark in Kochi to build, operate and manage ITparks for the promotion and development of investment in IT and ITES industries in Malabar region of Kerala.

13-Nov-2008

26-Nov-2008

I prepared a PDF document explaining the background, thought processes and my contact details. I sent this document to the officer who was in charge of this competition. He acknowledged the receipt of my designs.

Then I heard nothing about it and I forgot about the design – until yesterday when I saw the advertisement.

My logo is already in use

Yesterday I did a Google search and came to know that by June 2009, my first logo was selected from the entries as the official logo of CyberPark Kozhikode. The only modification that was done to it is replacing the tagline ‘work is play’ with ‘creating opportunities.’ This logo started appearing in many websites. Below are some screenshots and links.

Page of CyberPark Kozhikode on the official website of Kerala IT

Home page of Kerala IT: CyberPark logo appears in the footer

Blog entry on ‘Blooming Calicut’ dated 25-Jun-2009

Discussion thread on SkyscraperCity Forum dated 26-Oct-2009

Blog entry on the official website of Kerala IT dated 23-Jan-2010

My attempts to get the due credit

I am happy that my logo is used by a prestigious institution of the Government of Kerala. I am sad because none of the officials contacted me about the selection. I am angry because a lot of strangers are using this logo for about a year and I didn’t get the promised reward.

I contacted the officer to whom I sent the entry. He didn’t have the old e-mails between us regarding this design. So I forwarded the old e-mails to him and he acknowledged that the logo is indeed my creation. But now, he is not in charge of CyberPark Kozhikode. He told me that he has alerted the proper authorities about this incident and hoped that I will get the credit for this design.

I have also e-mailed the officers in charge of CyberPark Kozhikode. I am awaiting a reply. I will update this post as soon as I have any news.

Update 1 on 22-Apr-2010

The CEO of CyberPark Kozhikode informed me that he will do an investigation and settle this matter as soon as possible.

Update 2 on 29-Apr-2010

The CEO of CyberPark Kozhikode informed me that “we are working on a plan to recognize your success in the competition.”

Update 3 on 17-May-2010

I am very happy to inform that CyberPark officials recognized me as the ‘Designer of CyberPark Logo.’

I was invited for the foundation stone laying ceremony of CyberPark Kozhikode on 17-May-2010. A memento was presented to me by Mr. Bhaskaran, Mayor of Kozhikode. A cash prize was given to me by Adv. P M A Salam, Member of Legislative Assembly from Kozhikode.

The CyberPark foundation stone laying ceremony was attended by Mr. V. S. Achuthanandan (Chief Minister of Kerala), Mr. Mullappally Ramachandran (The Union Minister of State for Home Affairs), Mr. Elamaram Kareem (Minister for Industries, Kerala), Mr. Binoy Viswam (Minister for Forest and Housing, Kerala) and other dignitaries.

See photos of CyberPark Kozhikode Foundation Stone Laying Ceremony (17-May-2010) here…

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

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

A designer tries to convey an idea through a design. If others are connecting to the same idea, the design is a success. As a designer, I am very happy after seeing the above comments for my logo design from people who are strangers to me.

Introduction

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. The original logo is created by Eris Stassi.

Barcamp has an arm in Bangalore, India. They are conducting a technology workshop this week (13 and 14 September) and this is its seventh edition. A contest was organised by Barcamp to design a logo for the event that will eventually appear in posters, banners and t-shirts. When I came to know about the contest from my brother, I decided to take the plunge.

Inspiration
“When I’m creating a logo, I always like to embed a clever little idea into the design — even if it’s just a word mark, or an icon, it’s got to have some kind of little creative element, some extra layer of meaning.”
These are the words from Richard Scott, a well-known designer. Inspired by his words, I decided to use a ‘Bar,’ a ‘Camp,’ and a ’Seven’ in the logo. But how?

Thought Process
The official Barcamp logo looks like a ‘fire’ if rotated 90 degrees clockwise. Can I use it as a ‘camp fire?’ Suddenly, the picture became clearer. I will make a camp fire out of the official logo, the digit ‘7’ can be the fire wood, a camp with a door that looks like the digit ‘7’ and a window that looks like a bar code. Red color for the fire and I thought a green color is apt for the camp as it merges with the surrounding trees.
I need a tagline for the logo. Since I have pictured a camp fire and the Barcamp people are meeting to create new ideas or improving the existing ideas, the word ‘incubator’ appears to convey the right meaning.

This is my creation:

Did I win?

The selection was based on voting. The spirit was ‘let the best man win and all that!’ There were many logo submissions. I really liked three other logos submitted by some creative design wizards.

I didn’t win the contest.
If you voted for me or left a comment, thank you very much for your time!

Software: Adobe Photoshop CS3
Design date: 03-Sep-2008

A technology group in a large IT (Information Technology) firm recently crossed 50 million dollars in business. This group works in Telecom Domain. To mark the occasion, they are planning a celebration and needs a logo to be printed on gift articles and posters. The brief was that the logo should capture the essence of the celebration to mark this milestone. This logo design was an open contest and I was fortunate enough to send two designs to them.

There should be a ‘50,’ there should be a ‘Million’ and there should be a ‘$.’ This was the thought in my mind. After a dozen attempts, I came up with a line drawing.

Happy with this design, I opened Photoshop and started with ‘Pen Tool’ and ‘Paths’ for the design of ‘5.’ After an hour-long attempt to draw a curved path and ‘Stroke’ it, I realized that this is not my path! My attention turned towards the logo of the company. Wow! There is an ‘S’ and an ‘O.’ It occurred to me that this ‘SO’ can be passed off as a ‘50.’ See the result:

Following are the interpretations:

1. ‘S’ disguised as ‘5’
2. ‘O’ disguised as ‘zero’ and is shaped like the mast of a boat.
3. Two stylized Musical ‘Quarter Notes’ are added to the ‘S’ to resemble ‘$.’ The musical notes are justified because the technology group has its business in Telecom Domain. Since the company is a reputed firm from India, the colors match that of India’s National Flag. Also, the musical notes can also be imagined as oars of the boat.
4. The ‘Million’ is represented by an ‘M’ and is given the representation of ripple in water.

Though I designed one more logo, the logo featured here is the closest to my heart. While writing this, it occurs to me that the aerodynamic design of ‘50’ in the initial line drawing was better.

The latest news is that my logo is shortlisted from many other submissions. But after one or two rounds of voting, it failed to win a majority.

The best man always wins!

Software: Adobe Photoshop CS2
Design date: 03-June-2008