The Factory house

“The Logo Factory icon is not a factory at all – I designed it based on my old house. I had just started The Factory in its new incarnation (after giving up my day gig as an art director at an ad agency) and was working out of my cramped dining room office (hence the house). Business over the Internet was booming, and I was designing logo after logo (hence the boxes rolling out of the house).

My children – Amy and Matthew (then 4 and 5) were always complaining that I was working too much, so I tended to work in the wee hours of the morning when they were in bed (hence the solitary light when all other windows are dark). The only real problem was that my dining room office was on the first floor, but that was an accuracy that was overlooked for design purposes. There’s no real rationale or symbolism for the original logo design color combination – it was rather arbitrary. Purple and teal was a popular combination in those days – and purple happened to be my (now) wife’s favorite color. Trouble is, the combination wasn’t even web-safe – something that would haunt me for quite some time. Over the years the color combinations have come and gone – we settled in 2000 on a monochromatic version which we used ever since. With our new rebrand, purple remains The Logo Factory‘s ‘official’ company logo color, but the logo is color agnostic – we can change it depending on how, and where it’s being used (designing our stationery demonstrated that).

In terms of font selection, computer design was really hitting its stride around ’95, and many fonts were sleek, slick sci-fi treatments. I wanted to emphasize my illustrator background, and was bored to death with techno-fonts. I selected a broken typewriter lettering that was customized into the text portion of our logo. That font remained unchanged over the years, but the sizing and aspect ratio relationships were altered in order to accommodate various uses, web addresses what have you. It became rare that we used the house icon and text together, other than our core material like letterheads, business cards and use on web and blog headers. While I’ve used variations of The Logo Factory since 1993, we officially registered the trademark – name and art – in 2001.

At times I got bored with the logo and thought about changing it, but there’s a lot of history in the little house icon and it’s served us well over the years. We added some 3D versions a few years back to ‘spruce’ things up, but it was only last summer that I decided to retire the logo, after an exhaustive attempt to keep it, and finally develop a completely new look for the company. I still have a lot of emotional attachment to our original logo, so I’m sure you’ll see it here-and-there on our marketing materials and website.”