The current panorama of Windows Phone app development is something like:

If the mountain won’t come to muhammad, then muhammad will go to the mountain.

Or whichever way that quote actually goes but, the point here is that muhammad is the WP devs and the mountain… well it’s pretty much every popular app in iOS and Android. And that’s the story of how WP has gained throughout its history access to Twitch, Pandora, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, Google maps, Google Voice, Google [insert name of project], and (soon) Vine. It’s kind of sad to see that very little companies actively develop for Windows Phone or even take us into account. That of course has changed a little lately, with new great apps like the Twitter app (now with filters), Facebook, Foursquare, Teamviewer, and other upcoming much-needed apps like Waze or Tapatalk.

Despite this, we have great (GREAT) devs working hard to fill in the holes and bring all those awesome services to our platform. One of them is Rudy Huyn, the dev for 6sec (and other great apps like the Wikipedia one, and that 9gag one).

This is the part in the post where I tell you that my frustrated dream is to become a programmer, and that I suck at it since I struggle at very basic PHP and all that. Well, I was added to the private beta test of 6sec, and I was decided to help in some way, even if I couldn’t code (or do bug reporting) for the life of me. So when Rudy posted the first iteration of the logo for the app, I knew it was my time to help!

No offense to my dear friend Rudy (who is an amazing dev and whom you should give all your money to right now), but this logo did no justice to the nice little app he had built, so I decided to take a shot at it and make a logo for 6sec.

Drawing inspiration from the Real Deal

The ‘actual’ Vine logo is one I really like.

Specifically the 'V’ in its standalone, icon version. It’s simple and appealing. It shows the V from Vine while it in itself does have that 'viney’ look (it looks like a vine, hurr). So, if this is a third party app aiming at offering all the capabilities that the real deal does, then we might as well try to emulate it in all aspects.

First, I looked for a font with a '6’ character that had similar characteristics to the letters used in Vine’s logo (the Vine logo is not an actual font, it was custom made). I ended up picking Edifice Classic because it’s a very sorta 'curvy’ kind of font (not really sure how to put it):

And after playing around with the bézier tool for about 3 hours (I’m really bad with the bézier tool, sorry) I ended up with something like this:

It had that 'viney look I was going for, but it felt pretty bare to me., I tried then adding some boldness to it.

Ok MUCH better now, in my opinion. However, my dear little sister pointed out something for me:

It looks just like a six really, I don’t see a whole lot of vine in it, why don’t you make the tail longer?

And that did it. It was a such an obvious thing to do that I can’t see how I didn’t think of it at first.

Now it looks like a pig tail!!

She said, but I didn’t care. It is a little wiggly, twined vine to me (and to anyone without the weird imagination of my sister). OH WAIT! That’s it! I had a perfect vision in my head where I convinced Rudy to name the app 'Twine’ and it would make SO MUCH sense with the logo and everything, it felt PERFECT.

However, I noticed that there is already a tool/app called 'Twine’ in iOS so that could possibly mean legal trouble (I mean, it’s already bad enough that Rudy is making a third-party app for a service that runs on private APIs). A man can dream though!!



I then added the little -“- thingie to the logo even though I hated it, just for the sake of the current name of the app:

I presented it to rudy and he liked it! The reception from other people was really positive so in it went. Thankfully the little quote thingie was dropped in the end and now it’s only our twiggly friend in the live tile with the characteristic Vine green as background.

Let me know what you think of the logo!

(you can also let me know what you think of my posts, I know some think they’re a little long to belong to Tumblr but OH WELL…)