This week the Hudson bloggers circle back on the great logo debate...The Third + Bond logo, unveiled. No matter which old flames show up to cry about how they were afraid to say those three little words before, or to complain that this was not the #1 pick during the voting in Week 48, we will not budge. This is the one we love. Bachelorette Jillian got her pick and we got ours. Why did we pick this one over the wisdom of the crowd? What was the process in eliminating suitors? How is it that the café leche and orange logo was the last man standing but since the rose ceremony has transformed its colors?

Let’s take a look back…

In Week 48, we showed you 8 logos. Some of them included leaves to connote environmental sustainability. Some of them made clever combinations of the number 3 and letter B. One took advantage of the intersection of streets. And another was… well, so boring we’ve already forgotten it. There were a lot of choices. After getting your thoughts, we reaffirmed our goals for the logo.

We wanted a logo that gave a quick impression of our story while also being simple and graphically strong.

Our story is about being a modern adaptation of the brownstone or townhome. The logo needed clean lines (read: modern) and subtlety (read: contextual new construction). Strong but not noisy. The square in this logo has clean lines and the plus is crisp. The square itself is defined with certain boundaries. It isn’t flashy, it is solid.

To test graphic portability, we looked at the top 3 logos in a mock-up of the NYT classified section. In black and white, this logo popped the most. It also had the advantage of going easily from positive to negative (a black square with white text or vice versa).

Probably 95% of the team was convinced to go with the + logo and yet the hold-outs wouldn’t budge from their opinion that the logo looked like it belonged in a skateboard shop. It wasn’t the kind of logo that made you want to buy a home. It made you want to grab your bro and go ollie a twelve-set.

It had been easy to get rid of the 3/B logos because they didn’t say anything other than that we could be clever with similarly shaped text. But getting rid of the #1 voted logo was tough. Many of us responded to its elegant font. The leaves growing from the d were better integrated than in any of the other green logos. And that’s what the crowd told us… or did it? We wondered if the voting was skewed because this logo was most prominently displayed.

And then those leaves started looking a little too cute. And when placing the logo on a page, it always seemed to need a box or a line to sit on. The negative space was too undefined. We tried putting it into a box and giving more definition to the leaves. But the logo just looked awkward and busy. And it lost the lovely light quality present in the white background.

So, we looked for ways to warm-up the skateboard shop logo. We tried taking the font from the other logo and dropping it into the square. But it looked stunted instead of graceful. We also tried the softening impact of a leaf. But then the plus and the leaf competed as symbols.

We went back to the original font and talked about different colors, especially getting rid of the orange and deepening the brown.

The instant we saw the dark green (so dark it looks brown) square and the spring green + we knew this logo was the one for us. The new colors transformed the logo instantaneously. The colors were warm and spoke of hearth and home. The green plus reminds you that the project is environmentally sustainable without hitting you over the head with it, or assuming that is your top priority. The resulting logo is gender neutral, recognizable, and confident in its own sturdiness.

Just as Jillian was Jason’s third place pick and then won the grand prize of love, the third place logo of your choice has become the center of our attention and the only logo in our hearts.

Inside Third & Bond: Weeks 1-93 [Brownstoner]
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