For the last few weeks I've been working on some projects, but there is one in particular that I think will be really useful for the blog community. It's called Sikbox. Sikbox is a web app that allows you to add a live search to your site, or any site. It uses the Yahoo Boss api and it actually works better than my Drupal default search system.

This project was done pretty quickly. I had the honor to work on the logo and web design with my brother, Eduardo Sasso, the Ninja programmer, and Fabiano, the CSS samurai.

Anyway, in this post I want to share a bit of the ideas and the design process for the logo creation.

Doing the home work

The first thing we did was look for references. We visited lots of sites and also used the very helpful http://patterntap.com/. Below are some of the references we had.

First ideas

The basic idea for the logo was to create a clear association with search. The most common and iconographic symbol for that is the magnifying glass. However we wanted a very subtle element and the first thoughts and sketches we had, tried to avoid that.

For the first designs we tried to use the search box result and the cursor for the symbol as you can see below.



I'm terrible at drawing but they always help ;)

Back to the roots

After some sketches and designs we decided to forget about the other symbols and try to go with the magnifying glass (but again something subtle and discreet). The idea we had was to create the "b" with that element. Also we had to rethink our idea for the best font style, we gave up the idea of a serif font.

Refining the idea.

Our first thought was use shadow to create the 3D effect, but as I always like to do the negative version, the shadows wouldn't work well in that format. We decided to make the effect without the shadow instead.

Final design

Of course the whole process was much longer and painful :) but we think the end result was really cool and, despite the fact that we didn't want the magnifying glass symbol in the very beginning of the process, it ended up a lot better than we had thought.

That's again why I think we have to like the design process otherwise this sort of starting from scratch thing can be very traumatizing, but if you learn to enjoy that everything will flow much better.