Looking for opinions on my logo

Cianos

Hey,
Trying to come up with a logo for our new site.





The above is just a rough sketch, it's more the idea or the overall visual feel that we're interested in hearing about. At the moment I think it's a little too distressed looking. The site will be an online directory for live music. Also, what do you think of the name audiograff.com?

Any help appreciated:)

forbairt

Hmm... these are my personal opinions so please don't take any offence ...

name doesn't do much for me ... but then maybe once you build up a brand around it so to speak it would

The logo ... hmm... not sure what the arrows have to do with anything ... how will it scale down to website logo size ? ....

Its got the feel of grunge ...to it rather than generic music ? was that the effect you're going for ...

of course it needs to be centered a bit better as well ...

edit: .. I know what its reminding me of now ... the grandtheftauto logo

DonkeyStyle \o/

It's a bit abstract... I'm not seeing a connection between the logo and the function of the site... not even a little bit.
It's crying out for an audio jack or something.

I think the ".com" is given a bit too much weight in the logo... have you tried a version without it?
I think it's a bit on the "busy" side, and I can't imagine what it'll look like if you ever need to use it in a letterhead or scale it down for other parts of the site.
Having said that, my own logo attempts are laughable, so make of my input what you will.

projectmayhem

i like it. the ".com" is a bit too prominent, but the name rolls off the tongue and the logo itself is nice.

it follows the rule that a 5 year old should be able to draw a good logo, and this follows that quite well. loose a bit of the grunge effect and you'll be grand because with that much grunge it looks like the site is aimed solely at 16 year old slipknot fans.

as for the logo not having anything to do with the end product, it doesn't necessarily have to. i understand the arrows are pointing towards venues/gigs or whatever, but it's simple and easy. if you add musical notes or whatever it'll become too messy to be a recognisable logo on flyers or whatever

Cianos

Thanks for the comments. I want to appeal to a wide music audience rather than just grunge/rock/metal, so yeah I think it has to be made a bit more shiney. But I want to keep an edgey look to it, to look kinda underground rather than being mainstream and boring.

I want to inspire a kind of punk-rock, independent philosophy.

Regarding the name, I chose it because it has a lot of connotations, and I think it has a ring to it;

Audio graph - graphing audio
it sounds like autograph
audio graff - street level, independent etc
graffiti - urban, youthful, independent and energetic
audiograff - a couple of people said it sounds like a German electro name

One thing about it is that the logo doesnt have any musical references to it. But as ProjectMayhem was saying, I dont want to overload it with cliché images such as notes or guitars or things like that. I think the word 'audio' does enough of the work in that regard.

dr_manhattan

Dude, it's absolutely fine.

Personally, I'm not the type who reads a logo for 'relevance' or imagery. In order of importance for me are:

1. legibility at various sizes
2. "feel" of logo
3. neatness of style and self-containedness.

For precisely the reasons you list, the logo is attractive, punchy and self contained. It might degrade slightly with reduction, but that's why you do another version for smaller applications - again I feel it'll be fine.

best of luck

edanto

Yeah, grand idea. Some small tweaks maybe - the .com can be tiny at the bottom and then you can increase the font size of Audio Graff, changing the square arrow shape into more of a rectangle.

That has the bonus of suggesting a ghettoblaster/stereo in the blue lines, with the black spaces in the arrowheads looking a bit like speakers.

Small chance that if the .com was in the middle third of the horizontal might look like the buttons on a beatbox.

Creative Storm

I definetly think you should lose the .com. Maybe put the full web address in smaller writing under the whole logo.