And now, our logo

While waiting to present the first details about our products, I'm going to finish the story of our name and logo, started in the previous post.We wanted a logo that would draw attention to the fact that our name is the union of two words, "thing" and "think", so we tried to highlight the end of the name, the two letters gk. Here are some drafts:




The only drawback was the lack of an icon or a pictogram. After several retries, we noticed that the "gk" combination in the first draft resembled a stylized stick man. Better yet, a men with a club (Do you remember our manifesto? We are the new men with the club, and our club is irony).At that point we blended in the "thin" theme, and obtained this:

The letter are only half-drawn, to highlight the fact that the name is a half and half combination of "thing" and "think".

To really resemble a men, though, we were still missing a head. No sooner said than done:

What's more, the logotype resembles a bunch of PCB tracks. That is soo geek, and we love that ;)

Nomen Omen

While waiting to present you the first details about our products, I think it's a good idea to tell the origin of our name and logo. I will split the tale in two separate posts.
Stay tuned!

We started from the core values of our project, values emerged that night out drinking we told you about in this blog's first post. From the set go, we tried and looked for an English name that would use well-known words and terms, so that anyone with even a small smattering of English could understand them. The core ideas behind our project, however, were too many to be easily identified in a single name (design, made in Italy, open hardware, innovation, high tech, etc...), so we decided to focus on just a few of them: we chose to put the emphasis on innovation, and on the intelligence of our products, because we think that is what differentiates us the most from other Italian products. At this point we jotted down a lot of words related to the concept of "intelligent and high tech object", and came up with these:

smart, thing, intelligent, innovation, think, hi-tech, object, tool, cool, product

We thought of possible combinations and play on words, and eventually we narrowed down to list to three candidates:
thingk
innovathing
tcool

The first name plays on the concept of smart, thinking things; the second on innovation, but aimed to the world of things; the third on the concept of cool, interesting tools. Tcool was discarded, however, since we thought it out of our focussing on innovation and the smartness of our products. We had a difficult choice between the two remaining candidates, but in the end we opted for thingk since it is shorter, and more peculiar, able to stick in the mind of everybody. In addition the pronunciation (thin-g-key) also resembles the word "geek" :) Finally, the initial part, "thin", is an essential element of high tech design.

And so this is our name: thingk, the union of thing and think, things that think, things able to interact intelligently with us.