As many of you know already, together with Paul, Tomasz and Agata I organized this year’s European Ruby Conference. Here’s the post I recently published on EuRuKo website.

Many people told me they thought EuRuKo 2010 logo was beautiful. In fact, they were asking if we had any free T-shirts to give away as they liked how the white ethnic pattern looked on a red T-shirt. That’s exactly why I thought I should share the design process we went through.

So what’s the story?

When we first announced the competition for EuRuKo 2010 logo, we only got few designs. We chose what we thought was the best one… but we still didn’t love it. Luckily, the designer – Aneta from Krakow-based web design agency Manto – agreed to work with me until everyone was happy with the final look & feel (huge THANKS Aneta!).

Designing a logo should be a quick one, right?

Wrong. Especially considering the fact that organizing EuRuKo was not really our full-time job and rather an after-work activity.

To be honest, the bar was set high:

EuRuKo 2009 logo was really beautiful and we liked the idea of mixing local inspirations with ‘good old’ ruby. Hopefully Berlin 2011 (congratulations guys!) team can continue this short-lived tradition!

Design decisions are always tough – they depend much on personal preferences and perspectives. We needed probably something like 3 months (!!) to produce EuRuKo vivid-yet-simple logo. That’s a long time when you think that the designer actually never got paid – the initial competition just like all EuRuKo-related tasks was considered ‘community effort’.

Someone should be in charge (get ready for long hours!)

Having on a team people with different tastes is great.. but it makes things complicated, too. And – excuse my personal observation – men & tech people are rather conservative about design . A good tip for next year’s team – choose one person among you who ‘feels’ design and let them work with the designer. In our case that was me. An important thing to realize – in the beginning it seems that you only need logo but you will really need tons of stuff: website design, sponsorship pdf design, brochures, tickets, posters and all print stuff you can think of (including badges and drink coupons!). Make sure you work with a patient designer!

Final decisions…

In the end you ‘just’ have to reach that point when everyone accepts the final logo in one or another variation. In a bigger team (3+ people) a consensus of ‘liking it‘ or ‘loving it at first sight’ is very unlikely.  People usually need time to get used to what they’ve just chosen and accept that they can’t mix ‘all the best things from every option’. That’s the paradox of choice, too. Before reaching that point of approval there will be moments when everyone just stares at all different logos… not feeling good about any of them. Or – hating every single one – because if you care about something (and boy did we care about EuRuKo!), things get emotional.  Such dead-end is a good moment to ask for outsider’s advice. We asked just a few people and it really helped us speed up the process. We personally decided not to do ‘community voting’ because we didn’t think it was a good idea. Hope this helps

Here’s how the logo evolved in a chronological order:

Finally:

In the end – we’re all happy with the end result Which one do you like the most? Comment here or @ us on Twitter: @euruko or @elamadej!