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We’re very proud of our design capabilities here at dynamIt. We started mainly as a dev house, but quickly realized the value in having rock star designers on staff. All of the sites we design are custom and the critical aesthetic eye is invaluable in development of User Interfaces for our systems.

Our lead designer - Phil Franks - is multi-talented. He continually puts out stunning designs, wowing not only clients but everyone here in the office with his innovation and vision. In the last few months, he put one of his favorite talents (logo design) to use and saw some pretty spectacular results.

DataPortability is an organization that champions the “idea that individuals should have control over their data by determining who can use it and how it can be used.” The concept is important on the internet today as more and more information is stored and available on the web. All of the major players including Microsoft, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc. are on board and the technical best practices being developed will no doubt be a big part of standards in web for a long time.

Enter problem - DataPortability finds out that their logo happens to look a lot like the Fedora logo (read more about this here). Instead of dropping loads of cash and hiring some big firm to design a new logo [although they coulda shoulda come to dynamIt ] DP engaged in a concept called crowdsourcing and opened up a global contest for new a new logo. They utilized Flickr as the collection/viewing mechanism and things really took off. The contest was PR’d by popular blog/site TechCrunch . Nearly 500 submissions came in from around the world. The submission period was closed and the logos were reviewed by panel of judges that have these nice little companies in their titles:

* Malthe Sigurdsson, Brand director at Skype
* Fred Oliveira, Webreakstuff.com
* Tom Coates, Yahoo
* Ashley Hall, Yahoo
* Fiona McDougall, OneWorld Communications
* Michael Pick, Smashcut Media

Long story short - Phil’s design made the short list/final cut of 15 from the nearly 500 original submissions. Not too shabby huh? See Phil’s logo right below >>

The final phase was a public vote. While Phil’s logo wasn’t chosen in the end (and believe me we are not fans of the winner), we think that it is a tribute to his incredible talent that one of his concepts was selected as one of the top 15 (actually it was ranked #2 by the judges before the public got their hands on things). *Note: Strike 2 against DataPortability today as a French company has sent a second cease and desist letter claiming that the new logo is infringing on theirs. We’ll see how that turns out.

We look at the entire situation as a great opportunity to showcase the skills of a member of the dynamIt team. Also, I point out that this is another example of the go-get-’em attitude and initiative that we all take: not only are we working hard on client charges, but we pursue our passions individually as well.

one.

:: Nick ::