500hats needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 33 designs submitted by 16 freelance designers.
Warm Gun, a 500 Hats production
My name is Dave McClure. I'm a geek, an entrepreneur, a blogger, and an investor. I produce events related to startups & technology, and i also invest in consumer internet startups. I'm basically a dork who knows nothing about design. Yeah, i know... deal with it.
I'm putting together a conference on best practices in design & user experience, for both web designers and NON-web designers (engineers, entrepreneurs, business & mktg folks).
Warm Gun is a design conference for non-designers to help understand what design is all about, why/how design makes users "happy", how to measure a "successful" design experience, and why/how design can help improve business objectives.
Audience will include the following folks:
- web designers, UX & usability testing folks (speakers & attendees)
- NON-designer startup geeks, engineers, & entrepreneurs (attendees)
- business, mktg, corp & investor folks from tech & web industry (attendees & sponsors)
Logo should incorporate the following:
- Name & Tagline ("Warm Gun: Designing Happiness")
- Visual Elements (1-3 iconic visual images)
- Strong Colors
- Emotional / Psychological Impact (violence, love, heat, etc)
While the design does not *have* to use these elements, i initially envisioned 3 iconic elements as part of the design:
- burning flame
- smoking gun
- heart with a bullet through it
(simple idea was a visual equation, "flame + smoking gun = shot thru heart"... example attached below)
style ideas: the title "Warm Gun" comes from the Beatles song "Happiness is a Warm Gun" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happin…_Warm_Gun), so i was thinking the logo could draw from the following styles and/or posters from the 60s/70s:
- Beatles / Yellow Submarine
- James Bond / Man with the Golden Gun, Live & Let Die, etc
- Nancy Sinatra / Boots are Made for Walking
- Quentin Tarantino
(you get the picture: love, violence, sex, emotional impact)
other words that come to mind:
- passion
- action
- impact
the idea is how to use design to drive passion / emotion in people to take action(s) that have (measurable) impact.
how can we explain what elements of design make users passionate enough to DO something... something meaningful for them (happiness, productivity, fun) that also achieves a measurable business goal (drives user action, attracts customers, generates value / money, etc)
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