As I said in a previous blog post, I currently work for theForge Inc in Makati and one of the first things I had to do for them was a logo for their project Deal Market.
A brief explanation of Deal Market:
The website allows for the buying and selling of pre-owned vouchers purchased from Group Buying sites such as Ensogo, Cash Cash Pinoy, Groupon.com.ph, Metrodeal, etc.
As a background story to this, (and I don't really recommend to other designers, but at that time I felt pretty comfortable about it so it's case to case). This logo project was actually my "design test" (I don't really believe in these pre-employee things like a "design test") to get into theForge. I went into the interview and they said, here is your design test we need at least five logo studies for this concept. They gave me around two hours but ofcourse, logos aren't made overnight but it was a job interview so I just tried to pull things out of my ass as much as I could.
They gave me a bunch of logo ideas that we're submitted before (so i did have somewhere to build from) which had a lot of "house" and "handshake" executions which was fine but I felt all the executions we're missing an important core of deal market (and they looked a lot like a GK campaign). That core is the idea that you "re-sell" and there is a two-way transaction happening on the website (which is at the core of what a "marketplace" is). To add to this, one of the main selling points of Deal Market is that people can get part of their money back when they suffer buyer's remorse from panic buying vouchers.
The first thing I thought of is the "deal ring" idea which moved to looking at the classic market place look. The idea of 100% approved stamps suddenly went into my head and I thought why not jump from there.
Obviously because it was rushed (2/3 hours for a logo? seriously people spend nights on logos). I didn't have time to perfect much of the typography or color palette for this.
Later on after my first day (with introductions and all that), the logo project revisited my desk and we decided to look at what I had currently.
After going through cleaned up versions of what I had submitted for my interview we focused in on the stamp look as it did remind people of the 100% satisfaction feel of marketplace stamps.
This was the original cleaned up version of the deal market logo, I chose green and shades of green to be the main palette as green symbolizes growth, freshness and the idea of money. We had a couple iterations after this regarding color choice and the direction of the arrows (we're superstitious people... fengshui and all that).
As much as I liked the more lime green green we opted for something darker. After a couple discussions and fang shui consultations we went with a darker green and added stars to a and k as well. and so we have the final logo
I'll get to other stuff with Deal Market in a later post.