SendSocial sneak peek!

What is a launch without a sneak peek into what it’s all about? Exactly!

We’re very excited to see how SendSocial will be received by you guys, and we simply can’t wait to launch this. As much as we can’t wait to hear your opinion, receive your feedback and respond to your criticism, as much do we want to get everything in place before launch. Having this in mind, we still want to show you a bit of the app behind this service, which is why we thought this post would be appropriate. Below you’ll be introduced to a few features and design implementations, which we’ve passionately worked on for the last couple of weeks. We strongly believe in the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid) and have tried to design with that written on post-its everywhere… almost true.

Even if you want to see more (and I would like to show you more), I think this will be it for now; just to keep your (and our) excitement alive. I’ve heard though… it’s still a rumor…that another member of the SendSocial team will take you on a tour through the system, at some point before launch! So, you might want to keep an eye out for that. As usual we always welcome comments, suggestions and whatever you might have of thoughts about this (ad)venture.

Thanks for reading, take care – @marcfalk

The SendSocial logo

I turned into Color-Man and created a few schemes. As a designer, you’re in the superior role to manipulate people according to your own opinion. If you like one logo and think it’s the best, just make the other logos look boring… of cause, I would dream of doing that, but I must admit that I made a few ugly ones to make the good ones stand out (don’t tell the other guys ). Take a look for yourself:

A logo… it means more than you think. Can you, standing on one foot, explain to me what exactly a logo is, and what all the glamour is good for? At first I could barely mention a thing besides “color” and “shape”, and I’m the designer on this team, Christ!

Anyway, I looked in our dictionary, and as usual it has a pretty neat explanation:

A logo is a graphical element (ideogram, symbol, emblem, icon, sign) that, together with its logotype (a uniquely set and arranged typeface) form a trademark or commercial brand. Typically, a logo’s design is for immediate recognition.[1] The logo is one aspect of a company’s commercial brand, or economic or academic entity, and its shapes, colors, fonts, and images usually are different from others in a similar market. Logos are also used to identify organizations and other non-commercial entities.
Wikipedia – “Logo”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo

Now, one thing is the final result and the importance of it, another thing is the process of creating an “aspect of a company’s commercial brand”. A process can be long or short, and if I were to describe our logo creation process, I would describe it to be a bit longer than expected, since the final logo has been through a lot of thoughts, previews, colors, shapes and considerations; which I guess is pretty standard procedure anyway. Not that we’re not happy about the outcome, we really are – time well spent.

I went through my SendSocial-inbox, and I found some words of inspiration, among our frequent discussions, describing our needs for the logo. 1½ month ago we wanted a logo with arrows (symbolizing logistics), some kind of social element or icon in it (since using our service requires action from both sides), and at the end we wanted the “S” to play a certain role.

My first attempt, with inspiration from @antonystevenson, was this one:

People thought “Okay, that is nice…”, but we weren’t looking for a “Okay, that is nice…”-logo. Giving the S and the arrows a second look, you’ll immediately think of the devil’s tale and

a certain object I don’t want to explain any further (@tombeckenham – team member, SendSocial)

Therefore it was requested that we continued our journey towards an acceptable logo, which I’m very happy we did. I sketched a bit which resulted in following logos:

Looking at these was a start. I mean, we had only considered one logo, so having 4 of them gave inspiration for new thoughts. The clever eye might notice some social elements in the first one, and some in the other ones, but we were not convinced that any of these logos would do what it would take to become the breathtaking “SendSocial Logo” (wow!). We spent a conference call brainstorming, and I grabbed my pencil and paper whereas I began my trip to the lands of logos. The next round of logos was… multifarious in some way.

I sent these around, and we all agreed that inverted arrows were THE thing we had been looking for. With help from Antony, I came up with the following logo, which we decided to be our final one (in black & white):

Now, a polished logo in black & white is cool, useful and (hopefully) recognizable. When you’re making logos for web applications the first part of the process is finished when you got yourself a b/w logo. Upcoming is part two which includes colors and color schemes, and it can now and then be a war in itself to find the right set of colors. I kept my mind positive though, I have worked with these guys for a while now, and no matter what decision we need to make, it WILL be made.

I turned into Color-Man and created a few schemes. As a designer, you’re in the superior role to manipulate people according to your own opinion. If you like one logo to be the best, just make the other ones look boring… of cause, I would never dream of doing that, but I must admit that I made a few less beautiful ones to make the good ones stand out (shh! don’t tell the other guys). Take a look for yourself:

By now you know a little about the SendSocial logo, and my intentions are not to keep you here forever so I’ll make it short. After the color schemes had been sent around we decided to go with the pink/blue scheme (might as well call it the “the Flickr scheme”), but we wanted a few modifications to it. Furthermore, a few ideas from Antony led to another set of schemes, and the last preview I sent the team was this one:

Everyone agreed that one of those would fit SendSocial, but we chose the blue/green logo because WE think it has funkyness, a corporate touch and great colors for the website (speaking of harmony and balance).

So, now you know the story of the SendSocial logo, which in my eyes, fought brave battles and finally reached victory, to the delight for everyone. May it live long and last forever.

Thanks for reading, take care – @marcfalk

You can be a part of this

But first, I’ll introduce myself. I’m Marc. I love colors, the use of colors and the outcome of mixing colors. If I were a superhero, people would call me Color-Man, and I would paint the streets with colors of happiness and anger, because the sweet is never as sweet without the sour. And as you can read, I’m also the designer at SendSocial; a part of the team behind this beautiful service.

It is no secret that we are developing SendSocial as a virtual team . Even though we met through Twitter, discussions, ideas and the progress of this project in general is moving forward, and it’s moving fast. We have been working on this for 6 days now, and we have discovered a lot of situations, challenges and problems about this concept, but the more complications we seem to find the more solutions appear. Though we are a solid team of 5 entrepreneurs, and some of them very talented in their field, we are not the experts, who can say if this is going to work or not, we can only believe in it.

What we need for this project to be a success though, is help and feedback. And this is where you can play an important role in the development of SendSocial, so listen. No one is better at developing a service than users themselves, without their need and use of it, there wouldn’t be a service. Since we haven’t launched SendSocial yet, I understand if it is hard to come up with something, but I will promise you that every suggestion will be discussed and considered, with no exceptions.

So, if you got ideas, thoughts, things you do not understand or anything else, and I mean anything else, then let us know…We’ll be happy to hear from you

Take care – @marcfalk