Damon Clinkscales

For the longest time, I’ve been meaning to develop a brand that is different than my personal brand for the work that I do building apps.  The applications I’ve created so far have been about building something that I wanted for myself and something that is useful.  SnapTweet was created as a way to easily bridge Flickr and Twitter for picture posting, DoesFollow (and now the Twitter List membership check) were built out of frustration with the inconvenience of Twitter’s interface for determining followership (especially with large follower counts).  Finally, WhereBeYou was a Cafe Bedouins evening hack to do the reverse geo lookup for accounts which set geo coordinates instead of city/state for the Twitter Location field.  I got tired of seeing geo coordinates and wondering…now where the hell are these people anyway…?

I’ve got a list of ideas, most of which have not yet been documented on my blog and a couple of these are under development.  As slow as the progress is sometimes, I know that I will continue to make more useful things as the years go on and I want to have a place to bring those things together under one name and that brand is Podlabs.  Any web apps that I build will have a branding stripe somewhere on the page saying something to the effect of “A Podlabs Production”.  My iPhone Developer Program registration for iPad and iPhone development is under Podlabs as well.

I’m working with Scott Butler of Scott Butler Design on the logo and together we’ve developed some mockups of a concept.  Originally, the POD in Podlabs was referring to iPod, as, back in 2005, I had the idea for a wine application for iPod (that required a companion Mac app).  These days, iPod has morphed into iPod Touch, iPhone, and the soon-to-be-released iPad, so the POD part needs to be more broad than just iPod.  I think the pod motif can still work as it suggests futuristic, space, sleek, self-contained, etc.   The current logo concept is a sleep pod looking thing with an electrical cord and connection point.  Below, I’ve included 7 different variations on the theme and I’d like to know what feedback you have on the choices.

Please select your top 3 favorites from the above 7 choices. Also, if there is a particular visual element or color which you particularly like or don’t like, I’d like to hear that as well.

Some examples of things to consider are:

1. the outlines around the letter, versus no outline
2. lowercase versus capital L
3. ‘a’ sitting on top of ‘L’, instead of beside
4. the pod
5. the cord
6. the font style and the feeling it evokes
7. color schemes  (of those shown or is there some other scheme that might work well?)

What are your thoughts / feelings when you first look at it?

Thanks for your feedback!