Barrel AI logo design
Background story
In the spring of 2017 I meet with some people with a great interest in machine learning. But the meetings were more about how to create a group and what we should do with the group. Should it be a consultancy agency and try to sell ML to companies or should we focus on education in an attempt to raise the game on AI in the region. And we did not get to talk so much about ML so people dropped off as the time passed. The last event we were 3 who meet up. So, I decided to try out a workshop at 99 strange collective animal names, that shows the English names for different groups of animals. And there we found a barrel of monkeys. And the barrel just stuck with us and it was available as a domain. So, we bought it.
Now I wanted to create a logo for the project, and my initial idea was a monkey looking out through a barrel. I wanted to include the curiosity of a monkey and the barrel surrounding it. Both because I wanted to emphasize that things happen inside the barrel. When we meet and share ideas, but I also wanted to hint at a barrel of beer or whiskey, since many of the events will have a more relaxed setting as an afterwork discussion.
The Logo design process
My first draft on a piece of paper looked like this.
Later I took the time to explore some different ideas.
In hinsight the first results looks more like it has to do with reproduction. And in a sense, it might actually be true that we are creating our offspring in AI. But that was not the point of this logo.
Eye looking out from a barrel, but might just as well be an egg:
Mokeny with "long tail". But brings your mind to a sperm:
This time with a monkey tail:
Clean short tail for estethics:
The last of them could easily be made to resemble a Q for Question or a slightly misspelled Qurious. And now I also want to try some colors. The brown was kind of a natural choice because it is the color of wood and many monkeys.
After some additional revisions and some research into how the eyes and nose of a monkey really looks I ended up in this logo. With the head framing the monkey is much more obvious. I feel that the logo still need some brushing up. But with limited time on my hands this is more than good enough to proceed.
If you want to know more about our barrel jump into barrel.ai and join out meetup group if you want to attend our events.
- Logo design