Last night, for fun, I took a pass at designing a logo to begin branding this site.

I thought it might be fun to create the lettering myself, rather than spend hours hunting through free font sites and winding up with something I wasn’t totally into.

This is my first pass, created in Illustrator (CS5) using just lines and circles.

Adaptabit logo - first pass

Earlier today I asked a friend who has years of design and typography experience to give me some honest feedback.

He said that it took him a few extra milliseconds to process what the first character was supposed to represent. It didn’t immediately come across as an “A” to him. A perfect example of how a developer or designer, working so closely with content or concepts, can forget that their audience doesn’t have the same familiarity.

He spun this as being a potential benefit, as once he determined what the shapes spelled out, the name of the site was more firmly fixed in his mind from the effort. He also said he could imagine the “A” becoming a stand-alone “character” representing the brand (which made me wonder why I chose the orange, lower-case “a” for my site’s favicon, and my Twitter account’s profile image.)

More technically, he said he didn’t fully understand why the third “a” was a different color, but that it didn’t throw him too much. Also, the stroke thickness of bottom curve of the “t” appears to be narrower than—or somehow out of alignment with—the vertical line and curve end.

From a branding standpoint, he said that this was clearly not a formal brand. He said it looks like a company making sneakers, but sneakers that he’d like to own.

Now, maybe he was going easy on me in light of our friendship, but I loved the opportunity to get a glimpse into how his mind works when looking at design.

My intention for this site is to offer insight into my mind as I look at the usability and user experience of websites and other applications I come across.

I’ll be spending the next few weeks creating a theme for this blog and documenting my decisions.