So, tonight we unveiled the new Big Dogs logo, concluding our 30 days of not jacking off at work.

We hadn’t updated our logo since Ethan from marketing got wasted and pissed on the laptop where we save all our image files. Our brand, as represented by the logo, has been valued at as much as ~$200 dollars. So, while it was time for a change, it’s not something we could do lightly.

On a personal level, I love brands, logos, color, design, playing two-hand touch, eating way too much, watching my team win, and, most of all … TWINS. ;)

So, one weekend this summer, I rolled up my sleeves on one of my favorite Big Dog Graphic Tees, and dove into the trenches with our logo design team: Bob who came up with the name “Big Dogs”, Marc who’s a piece of shit, Russ who brought snacks, and our intern Max who is the only employee who owns a computer at home. We spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday installing something called “Adobe Illustrator” which cost a shit ton of money, but Max said it was “totally worth it” and “required” to put a picture of a dog next to the words “Big Dogs”.

We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Big Dogs - big, yet also dogs. Dogs that were big, with a nod to big dogs. Having letters next to it, that spelled out our company name. Big Dogs.

Other elements fell quickly into place:

We didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo. Straight lines don’t exist in dogs and are extremely rare. We Yahoo'ed dogs for like five hours and couldn’t find a single straight line.

We preferred letters that you could read. Max changed the font to some shit called Wingdings and wouldn’t change it back until Bob put him in a choke hold.

Then Max started saying some shit about something called “serifs”. Yeah ok, like that’s a real word.

We locked Max in the bathroom after that and tried to use Adobe Illustrator ourselves.

We gave up after a few minutes and let him out, but we didn’t let him eat any of the snacks Russ brought.

Marc, like a real piece of shit, dropped salsa on the computer and jammed the caps lock key so we had to go with all uppercase.

And, we were off. Here is the blueprint of what we did, calling out the picture of the dog and the words you can read:

Our last move was to make the dog’s tongue stick out, so you know it’s a chill dog.

Prior to the weekend, we had also polled our employees on the changes they wanted to see. Interestingly, 87% of our employees did not give a flying fuck about our logo. In terms of specific things, our employees said:

Why are you wasting so much time and money on this

You can do this shit in like five minutes

Just make sure there’s a dog on it

And don’t spell Big Dogs wrong

Seriously how do you fuck up spelling Big Dogs

While we hadn’t set out to please all our stupid employees, we gave them the finger and fired that one asshole who said we can’t spell.

Color and texture were pretty easy. Our black is black and our white is white. The other color is blue, I think. For the texture, it was pretty easy because it’s a freaking image. It’s flat.

Over the subsequent weeks, we’ve worked on various applications and treatments of the logo (truck nuts, bongs, tee shirts). No one noticed. We still haven’t told our intern Max that not only is he getting no money, this isn’t even giving him college credit. Maybe we’ll give him some tee shirts.

Here’s a music video that we played on repeat while we made the logo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He82NBjJqf8