ComDot Logo Contest

Jan 2020 · Sole Designer

Overview

Texting with customers is an informal part of doing business that is becoming more formal. Particularly in the car dealership business, salespeople text customers to arrange meetings, answer questions, and provide updates on inventory. To capture this trend, Remora created ComDot, a service that adds SMS abilities to existing business landlines and provides a full customer relations manager to organize meetings, notes, and sales opportunities coming in over chat.

Parameters

This project was part of a logo contest open to an online community of graphic designers on the messaging platform Discord. I had 3 days to work on my submissions, and each designer could submit as many entries as they wanted in any creative direction. Participants were also able to view and critique other’s submissions.

The three logos I submitted to the ComDot Logo contest

Goals to Achieve and Avoid

In looking at some of the existing entries, I found that many of the other entries in the contest focused on two motifs: the ellipse and the rectangular chat bubble. While these are appropriate symbols to use for a communication company, this direction had been thoroughly explored by other submissions and I wanted to differentiate my designs.
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With this in mind, I set out to create a logo that could:
· Represent more than just the chat capabilities of the product
· Was still appropriate for a communications company

Two overused motifs in other submissions were the ellipse and round-rectangle chat bubble.

Evolution of the logo from concept to final

Entry 1: Dynamic Nodes

The first concept I latched onto came from the idea of circles as nodes rather than ellipses. Nodes are the perfect symbol for both communication and technology and are abstract enough to identify a service that was more than just chat and communication. I tried several arrangements of circles but found a simple star to be most effective. Additionally, the perspective shift of the logo makes it dynamic and embodies the idea of progress. Finally, the color is the same as Remora’s logo which ties ComDot back to its parent company.

Entry 1

Entry 2: Bold Communication

Even though I didn’t want to step too far into the overused motifs, I felt that presenting an option that was in that wheelhouse would be good coverage if I were to present this to a client. Thus I created a logo that plays more into the communication motifs and utilizes an abstract chat bubble as its building block. The abstraction brings the chat bubble symbol far enough away from the real thing to not be the overwhelming message in the logo but still identifies ComDot as a communication company. I chose green as the accent color to aid the idea that ComDot’s core mission is to increase sales and darkened the blue to increase contrast with the green accent and against light backgrounds.

Entry 2

Entry 3: Logo from Play

While I was playing with the previous two logos, I stumbled into an interesting design that looked almost like an emoji. I pushed this playful side and out came a fun and friendly mascot. The dot near the person’s head makes it look like it’s waving or maybe holding a phone, and the person’s body represents the feedback loop and connectivity that ComDot provides.

Entry 3

Different fonts and combinations of weights that I experimented with throughout the process.

Final Reception

I received positive feedback from other participants and judges on my designs, particularly on my second entry. Ultimately, I created three logos that covered very different design moods and would all be perfect as ComDot’s logo.

Nick Blackley