Before I sat down I already had a style in mind that I wanted to shoot towards. So it wasn’t that hard to start the design process. When you are starting out it is a good idea to take a look at some quality logos to get inspired/motivated. Especially if you don’t have a direction.

A few great places to find logo inspiration are:

• Logo Pond
• Creatica
• Abduzeedo
• Brands of the World

First Iteration:

The first iteration of the Beerded logo was extremely rough. I started out by creating the basic shape of the elements and finding a suitable font to use. I ended up using a font called “Muncie” from Lost Type. I love the look of this font and it has “packaging” written all over it.

First Iteration

Second Iteration:

In the second iteration I added a small oval shape underneath the lettering. I knew that I wanted to have a place to put the “established date” in the logo to mimic something that you’d see used on actual packaging.

Second Iteration

Third Iteration:

In the third iteration I basically cleaned up some of the edges and tweaked the alignment of a few elements. I made sure that the accent lines on the top and bottom of the ribbon were flush to the outer edges and not peeking over.

Third Iteration

Fourth Iteration:

In this version, I added the “EST. 2011″ date and some wheat/barley leaves as accents to the date. I also added a slight line texture/pattern to the ribbon. The line pattern adds depth to the piece and keeps the ribbon from appearing flat.  Next, I duplicated the word “Beerded” and offset it by 3 pixels to the right and 3 pixels down. The second “Beerded” shape was then placed behind the first “Beerded” and then it was made darker to give a slight drop shadow effect to the lettering.

Fourth Iteration

Fifth Iteration:

The spacing between the bottom of the word “Beerded” and the bottom of the banner was awkward and not balanced very well. I was looking for a nice counter-balance to the spacing that was already established at the top of the banner. To accomplish the result I desired, I rounded the 3 middle letters “ERD” around the “EST 2011″ oval to maintain equal spacing from the bottom of the word to the bottom of the banner.

Fifth Iteration

Sixth Iteration:

To give a bit more detail to the glass itself I added a slight reflection in the form of a stripe. This pretty much finalized the beer aspect of the logo and I felt like the only thing lacking was a background. I added a monochromatic sunburst, oval and wheat/barley sprigs behind the beer.

At this point I wanted a little external feedback so I posted this version on the developer/designer community Forrst. The Forrst community is a very helpful bunch and I got a ton of helpful feedback almost immediately.

Some more useful comments were:

• “It kind of reminds me of a coffee cup, overall though, it’s a nice logo.”
• “A lighter beer would help a lot. It’s just that brown and white together the way you have it reminds me of a coffee cup.”

I then took this feedback along with other feedback from some friends and made another iteration.

Sixth Iteration

Seventh Iteration:

At first, I hesitated on changing the color of the logo to represent a brighter color beer. The reason for my hesitation was that I personally enjoy darker beers over lighter ones. Visually, I found that the lighter/golden color worked better and comes across as “BEER” in a more universal manner than the dark color beer above.

Seventh Iteration

Once again, I took to Forrst to gather some feedback in a sort of A/B testing. The response was drastically different. 4x’s the amount of people “liked” the lighter color logo over the darker one.

Dark color logo Forrst stats (as of June 29, 2011):

• Likes: 16
• Comments: 12
• Views: 26

Light color logo Forrst stats (as of June 29, 2011):

• Likes: 81
• Comments: 16
• Views: 35

If you aren’t on Forrst and you are a developer or designer you should be. If you want an invite just leave a comment below and I will randomly select 2 of you as I currently have 2 invites.

You may have noticed that my domain name has changed. You may be saying… “Hey what’s up with the .in instead of the .com?” whatever, you probably didn’t even notice. However, if you did notice and you do care about my domain name change, I did it because I geek out about these things. In all honesty I needed a change and it was easier for me to redo the site completely than it was for me to sift through old content and make it pretty. It also just felt right. Besides, I got to use a “vanity url” that I’ve sat on for a while. I may or may not have a matching vanity url shortener as well… we’ll see.

So it’s been an interesting couple of days changing up my personal site amidst client work and sleep. There has been a lot of things I’ve learned that will be valuable for when other people have to change their domain name in the future and have questions.

• I have written a couple hundred 301 Redirects so that I will decrease the loss in traffic (not that I get monumental traffic anyway).
• I created an ultra deluxe 404 landing page on my old site. In case visitors do hit a 404 they will know that I now keep my online goodies elsewhere.
• I have also completely weeded out some old projects that I don’t feel are up to par to display anymore.

Ultra Deluxe 404 Page

Basically, I’ve cleaned digital house this weekend and it feels great. I recommend digital spring cleaning from time to time. Side-note… I deleted 16 domain names last week as well. Yes, I still have domain names in my possession after deleting 16 of them and yes, I am aware that I have a domain name hoarding issue. Thanks.

Vanity URLs

I purchased my vanity url “bengill.in” about 6 months ago. The .in is a TLD or Top Level Domain for the country of India. I also purchased “bgill.in” which I am using as my personal url shortener with bit.ly’s free enterprise service. A great tool to search for a vanity url is domai.nr. Domai.nr allows for you to enter a domain name that you are looking for and it spits out creative alternatives or suggestions on the other side. You can see what domains are available plus, Domai.nr supplies you with multiple registrar links to make your purchase once you’ve found the perfect domain.

A few examples of vanity URLs:

• JMO.me – John-Michael Oswalt or JMO
• Ma.tt – Matt Mullenweg
• Chi.mp – Everything YOU in one place.

301 Redirects

Possibly the most annoying aspect of changing your domain name is the potential loss of traffic. The best way to circumvent the loss of traffic is through SEO (not enough time for this post) and 301 Redirects. Like I mentioned earlier, I have set up a couple hundred 301 redirects to send traffic from my old site to this new one. If you are using WordPress like I am, there is a great plug-in to aid you in this endeavor, Redirection.

Redirection allows you to do the following:

• 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
• Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
• Full logs for all redirected URLs
• All URLs can be redirected, not just ones that don’t exist
• Redirection methods – redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referer!
• Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
• Manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a WordPress post, or for any other file
• Full regular expression support
• Apache .htaccess is not required – works entirely inside WordPress
• Redirect index.php, index.html, and index.htm access
• Redirection statistics telling you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL
• Fully localized

Maybe this will help somebody out. If you have any questions please feel free to ask away.