The original Orbited (then known as “Orbit”) logo, was tossed together by one of Michael’s friends in about 5 minutes. It has a certain charm in its complete simplicity, but I was never much of a fan, and decided that though I’m not much of a logo designer, once I joined the team, the logo had to go, and if someone else wouldn’t step up to make a new one, I’d have to do it myself.

See the original for yourself:

I doodled in Illustrator, trying to incorporate various types of “orbits” into the word “Orbited.” After a few hours, I had found a font that I liked well enough (Cronos), with a very round O that worked reasonably well as a planet or star around which to draw an orbit. After a couple of hours of fiddling, I had created a brush stroke swoosh tail with a splotch comet, orbiting the O (yes, I realize tails on comets point away from the Sun, and don’t trail behind them):

I passed this around to a few friends, who pointed out that the black text was nearly unreadable on the dark blue background. But a couple of them, including Eben, also disliked the font and the brush stroke. He was nice enough to spend some time brainstorming with me. The two of us passed back and forth a number of ideas for adding depth to the orbit line.

I liked the concept of using the line width to convey depth, as in the third of the above attempts, and the approach worked well with a clean modern font like Futura (which conveniently has a very nice round capital O), and so I finally ended up with something that looked like this:

But in passing this around to friends, a quite common response was that the new logo was too cold and impersonal. They generally preferred a re-colored (to avoid the black text) version of the brush stroke logo.

So, combining (in my opinion) the best of each, I stuck Futura into the brush stroke comet orbit, and jazzed the whole thing up with some warmer colors. The result can be seen on the main website, but here it is for good measure:

Hopefully this one is good enough.

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