Thanks to everyone that gave us feedback on our logo design studies. Special thanks to Mike Nothum at Landmark Arizona, Ron Reimink at Ann Arbor Area Real Estate , Chad Sundin at Odeion Media, Ralph Cruz at TPI and Kenny Kohlmeier at Picks Pal. We appreciated your honest, thoughtful input. Our logo design project was truly a collaborative effort.

Our Logo

We selected the simplest of the design options in order to emphasize the contrast between the perfect structure of the word TRUE and the organic background shape. This contrast is important because the word TRUE has some “baggage meaning” attached to it, things like rightness, perfection and fundamentalism. But we’re using it in a more personal sense to represent concepts like essence, character and reality. The goal of our work is to collaborate with our clients to identify their unique qualities or business needs and craft an honest message or software solution to match.

The contrast we’ve created in the logo forces people to view the word TRUE differently; some are uncomfortable with the effect of the background shape, while others find it warm and friendly. Whatever the response, the first thing people notice is that the background shape is not TRUE at all…and that’s the point. It’s obvious that we’re communicating something other than the traditional meaning associated with the word.

We used earth tones because the word TRUE has it’s root in Old English, where it was synonomous with the word for TREE. The etymology of our name and the organic feel of our logo made the selection of tree colors (brown and green printed on natural stock) very…well, natural. Also, we wanted to distance ourselves from the web design community and the craze around bright, shiny, Web 2.0-ish marks.

Our Cards

Our first round of business cards were accidently cut too short, but we liked how the top and bottom edges seemed to be forcing the logo into its final organic shape; we’ve turned this mistake into a key part of our identity.

We wanted the back of the card to be as simple as possible, so we only included the necessary contact information. We didn’t want the redundancy of the web site address alone AND in the email address, so we added some space on either side of the @ symbol and applied a different color to “wearetrue.com.”

We like what we ended up with, and hope that you do too.