I could not resist this, we did not carve it in the end went for a more traditional look. Happy Halloween everyone.
logo
Look at that for product placement
I have obviously been out and about making the most of Feeding Edge as my new company. It is something some people have asked me why I did not just go and get another job elsewhere. Well its this sort of placement such as Metanomics gave me, that shows why I had to try and make myself available through Feeding Edge to the industry to make things happen. A regular IT job would not have had this sort of positioning and influence. Many of my fellow metaverse evangelists and experts have been hung out to dry in some cases, or still battling in various companies to deal with intransigence of those who do not get, or fear, the changes social media and virtual worlds will bring about to their status quo (Cue Seth Godin again!). In a new and growing industry though we are still not at the point of too many companies knowing they need us to help them make the transition. However we all know that they will. So we have to keep going to make the right things happen in the right places.
When your brand new company logo and name appears to the right of one of the most influential companies in the virtual world industry Linden Lab & Second Life and their CEO Mark Kingdon, and just above Millions Of Us and Reuben Steiger (The original metaverse evangelist formerly of Linden Lab) it does make you think you are doing the right thing 🙂
This really speaks to the power of us as individuals. A recent article on my wife’s financial management magazine (aimed at management accountants) spoke of companies having to understand that we now have pebbles and boulder organizations. A collection of pebbles, small fast moving easily collected and nimble can easily out maneuver a large corporate boulder. When those companies that are large boulders start to utilize the fact that they can be regarded as collections of pebbles rather than one huge mass then they will be able to survive and operate and thrive.Â
Of course if your are incentivized through money,power or ego to sit astride a large boulder the notion of smaller networked groups of pebbles will be threatening and scary. I do think though it is a case of adapt or die. Can large organizations deal with that? I think they can, I think it will happen over time but will need people who are willing to lead to make the changes happen quicker. Hey! that’s what I do for people 🙂
Do the “logomotive” moving brand identity
Part of the journey of discovery with Feeding Edge as a business has focussed around immersing myself in the logo. I know a logo does not make a brand, but as a flag to rally around it is a good place to start. There is something theraputic about finding new renditions for an idea, and executing them on the very platforms that I help people come to understand.
I had done a few of these before as we played with the eightbar image over the years.
The journey so far started with in the middle of the night with an image in my head, combined with a small plastic cog from a toy that was lying around in the kitchen and fueling my late night ponderings.
The logo was intended to be a simple line drawing to enable lots of easy transformations.
Xbox Live had an interesting web application to allow you to make scenes with your 360 avatar and so I gave that a go. It is really just a composite but I liked how it worked, and I was able to use my own background.
However I also tried out a version of the logo on my shirts in the 360 version of skate2 that I blogged here
That indicated to me that the sort of size and shape and simple approach was going to work. It was alot cheaper than printing real shirts first to find out too!
Another test was how quickly could I work up a Second Life version
Very quickly indeed of course! These are basic prims, but a good friend is building a scuplty low prim one for me and its looking very neat indeed, more in another post on that.
Finally in the journey so far, a quick rendition on the wonderful Little Big Planet on PS3.
I was particularly happy with this one as it was so quick to do, yet very satisfying.
I guess this sort of logo morphing does not fit in with heavily PR managed logos companies have, a degree of control and protection is placed upon them with lots of guidelines in force. With new environments and hence styles possible I think it will become harder for brands to deal with the minute details of control, but they will need to explore things in the ways I am doing here in order to be where the people are.