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I
spent about 3 weeks at home and at my favorite Indian restaurant
sketching ideas almost daily. The waiters at the restuarant were
my user focus group. I asked them if they would be comfortable putting
this logo on a T-shirt or on a baseball cap. I wanted to capture
a sense of modern elegance. I didn't want anything perfumy, yet
I wanted the elegance. I wanted strength and integrity with a touch
of my Indian heritage, but in a very subtle, clean, modern way.
I wanted a unique symbol that captured a sense of one's optimistic
spirit in life and captured the essence of the Name 'Urban Peacock',
a term I came up with for a film in 1993, and subsequently have
adopted to represent my freelance design consulting and film studio.
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Finally
I displayed 3 variations to the most honest feedback I could find....
after going through 2 notebooks of sketches and at least 2 months
of vegetarian thali dinners and idlee lunches. When my parents visited,
they had to see every single one of the sketches, as I carefully
watched for their reactions to each and every single one... talk
about personalized user testing :) They are familiar with my design
tactics, as I've been testing my designs on them ever since I was
at college in the mid-1980's :)
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And
before that, well, it was showing them every drawing I ever made
and seeing if it was any good based on their honest reactions. Luckily
for me they never sugar coated their responses, so I've learned
to really push the limits in coming up with designs that communicate
to a broad audience yet satisfy my personal sense of aesthetics.
I have to like it, otherwise I'm not satisfied and will press on
till the perfect balance between form and function, concept and
beauty are achieved.
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This
is what the waiters and I agreed on as the best logo. So this is
the birth of the Urban Peaock logo story :) The other, close contender,
well, it just looked too much like a Dr. Suess cartoon character,
though I still have a fondness for it :) One day I'll figure out
what to do with that one :) Perhaps another company :)
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