The Story of a Logo
This week we have a chance to hear from Socialholic Typewriter team, one of our 5 winning teams of the Mahallae Challenges.
It was last week that the 5 winning teams of Mahallae Challenge got the chance to meet at a workshop for an exchange of best practices, lessons learned and prototype testing. A warm welcome and friendly faces set the ambience of the meeting. Inspiring people who dare to imagine a better future through projects that can bring about substantial change met for a mutual sharing of ideas.
Each team shared their story and we shared ours or as we like to call it “The story of a Logo”. The Socialholic Typewriter seeks to create an online, social space where boundaries between dichotomized communities and art forms are overcome; within this re-imagined community, socialholic creators, that is to say each and everyone of us who uses social media as channels through which to stream their creativity, feel at home.
The project grasps this concept and materialises it. We wanted to offer more than just an online platform; we wanted to offer the experience of collective connectedness. That is when it occurred to us that the logo of the project could become the emblem that could bring a community to life. People felt the need to connect and commit to a project and we felt the need to listen.
That is how the idea behind the competition for the logo was born. We asked designers to submit logos which re-imagined the traditional typewriter in a modern social media era. Open to artists from around the globe the competition managed to collect 184 designs from 60 designers, a number that exceeded our expectations! The word was out there, people were gathering up! The recruited ones commented on the designs and then voted the one they preferred amongst the eight most popular. In this way, we made the logo design a collaborative project that invited writers and illustrators to come together and create, connecting with and building our tribe at the same time.
Some of the designs submitted. We were overwhelmed by the imaginative, creative ways designers interpreted The Socialholic Typewriter!
We had excellent contenders, but the one that seemed to gather a lot of attention was the one that used old typewriter buttons and emoticons, taking a vintage element and coupling it with a metacommunicative pictorial representation of facial expression -omnipresent in our social media era. One of our voters said, ‘Number 116 is my favourite. That immediately spoke to chat/social media because it included an emoticon.‘ Our team also felt that this particular design best communicated the concept of The Socialholic Typewriter as it aims to make the traditionally solitary writing journey, social. Therefore, we decided to take this particular design to the final round and after many changes and adjustments, the result can now be seen on our blog.
This is how the project defines being part of a community, to us it means being engaged in every step of the process, having a voice and an opinion. The need for a communal feeling which promotes an interactive flow of ideas is how the story of the logo began. This is the logo that can help build a community; it sparked interest in a playful way and it was able to inspire a movement even before its online debut.
We would like to thank you for embracing the project and helping us push the boundaries of the conventional ways of creative expression. Stay tuned for more.
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