Inside Third & Bond: Week 48

[nggallery id=”23387″ template=galleryview]

Since settling on GoCaGa-RedHook-FarSlope as our neighborhood, we have turned our attention to the next step in branding our project: logos. The logos in this post are some of the many great ideas Clarke/Thompson threw at us earlier this week when we sat down with them, our brokers from Corcoran, Leslie Marshall and James Cornell, and our new marketing guru consultant, Karen Auster of Auster Events. We wish we could unveil the logos for you with the same drama as Clarke/Thompson’s Katy Dwyer, who with great deliberation showcased each logo by flipping around a blank card to display the design while Pat Thompson and Melissa Hewitt took careful observation of which logos made our pulses rush and scalps tingle. Instead, you’ll have to scroll slowly down yourself. Voting is at the bottom, as is your opportunity to tell us in your own words which one you’d like to place your t-shirt order for.

A good logo is like an Olympic gymnast…

…it needs to do a lot with as seemingly little effort as possible. It needs to give you the most basic of information—the name. It needs to convey the story of the project—it’s green, it’s luxury, it’s family-focused, it’s quality, it’s high-design, it’s the newest, hippest, best!!! It needs to capture the attention of the targeted buyers, which are a diverse crowd. It needs to be memorable and easily recognizable. And it needs to do all this while in a format that looks as great on the cover of a glossy, colorful brochure as in a black-and-white column ad in the back of the Times.

For anyone who is pooh-poohing the idea that a logo is important think about the swoosh of Nike, the clean lines of Target’s bull’s eye, the smoothly bitten Apple, the cuddly panda of the World Wildlife Fund, or the seal of the Ramones. Or take a look at the top and side of this webpage—logos, logos, logos.

In devising a logo for Third & Bond, we’ve talked a lot about what we want to say and now we are trying to figure out how to say it. Probably not a cuddly panda. But what about a leaf? Do we need a leaf to let people know that this is a green project? Is it a single leaf of a bushy leaf? How else could we signal it? We talked about skipping the leaf altogether and going with logo 2 or 7 which work the 3 and the B into the same shape depending on how you squint at it. But some of us thought that didn’t add anything useful to the branding other than just being clever and neat-looking. Another hot topic was logo 6. A few of us love the big 3 and B because of the way it pops off the page and wouldn’t mind if the whole project was known as 3B. But others felt that 3B sounds like an apartment for rent and we’d get phone calls like, Hey, you’re showing 3B today? When are you showing 4A?

And then there was the whole discussion about fonts and how they make us feel. For anyone who has rented Helvetica, you’ll have an idea what that was like.

At the end of the meeting we decided to 1) solicit your opinions and 2) make a mock-up of the logo as if it’s in a black-and-white ad in the classified section of the Times. While a lot of our advertising will be web-based, we still want to make sure that the logo translates well when it is small, black-and-white, and on a page with a lot of competing logos and text.

So, go ahead and let us know which logos pop for you. Be convincing… you’ll be seeing it everywhere!
Inside Third & Bond: Week 47 [Brownstoner]
Inside Third & Bond: Week 46 [Brownstoner]
Inside Third & Bond: Week 45 [Brownstoner]
Inside Third & Bond: Week 44 [Brownstoner]
Inside Third & Bond: Week 43 [Brownstoner]
Inside Third & Bond: Week 42 [Brownstoner]

From our lawyers: This is not an offering. No offering can be made until an offering plan is filed with the Department of Law of the State of New York.”