Designing our logo

I am unconvinced logos for software companies (as opposed to programs) really matter as long as one doesn't go too far away from lower case letters in a box.  But it's fun to mess with them, and you have to look at your own logo every day.  We had some criteria for ours:

1. Not too many hues (I think 2 max is good)
2. Not too oblong for web layout
3. Meaningful about the company
4. Geometrically simple

We went with the key figure from our original meeting when we decided to go with mobile photography apps.

Excuse the "we're the best": it was for internal consumption.  There are a million versions of this diagram on the web and I believe they have their root in Good To Great (2001) where the center of the diagram is "the hedgehog".  The diagram itself has all the four properties above so let's use that.  We just have to work out the details. 

For geometry let's nerd out and look for too much order.  The size of the center region varies with spacing and we like the centers to be in cool spots: the center of each can be where the other two circles intersect.

We like the teal color, but it is low color purity, and we'd like at least the center to have 100% purity.  So we just need to decide how the color combines.  We could do a physical transparency model, but photo-processing is all about abstraction, and a physical model wouldn't do that, so we instead go to pure teal in the middle with lower purity teal in the surrounds.  We add white lines to make it less boring.  We pick the orientation by feel.

And now the key thing: declare it "good enough" and go on to things that definitely matter.   We added the name of the company over the logo on the website because we didn't like how it looked beside it:

But I do have to wonder whether we missed a chance for free publicity with accidental logo features.