new logo! Now we’re less likely to get sued by m!cr0$0ft..
by Franz
So my lawyer called me up the other day with interesting news.. “Your trademark application for concrete5(tm) is going well, you’re gonna be able to turn that TM into a little R with a circle any day, just get that c5 crap off of your website.”
“Muhhh???” I thought. ‘That c5 crap’ is pretty much everywhere. Not only does it show up more often than “concrete5″, but it is a really nice way to shorten the brand when you’re writing copy. It’s elemental, and since we’re a building material for the web we all kinda liked that. Moreover I’ve got 4000 stickers and a huge pile of screwdrivers with that on there.. generally, a shocker…
Sadly, it quickly became clear my lawyer was right. C5 as a brand is a mess. A simple google search turns up dozens of different things that are “c5″… a Citron car, a Lockheed jet, countless consultants – the list goes on and on and includes a certain software company in Redmond Washington that has a product called Microsoft Dynamics C5, which of course they’ve protected in every way money can buy. Woooops.
I think it’s pretty clear we’re not trying to ride on the coat tails of Microsoft Dynamics C5, but I don’t want to get dragged into court three years from now when concrete5 is more popular than Drupal and have my hat handed to me by 50 lawyers. Doesn’t matter if we’d win or not, we’d lose every dime we ever earned and it would hurt. That much we can all agree on.
Moreover, this got us thinking. What does “c5″ mean anyways? NOTHING! It just came around out of laziness. “concrete5″ makes sense. We’ve got a building material for the web. The building material is flexible, strong, you can make anything out of it and add to it easily over time – just like its namesake. The “5″ is the major release version, and is part of the brand because A) you can’t trademark the word ‘concrete’ B) it’s an odd number and looks cool and C) we firmly believe we’re building towards an end state. There will not be infinite versions of concrete CMS.. at some point, the core will be “right” and all we’ll be doing is dealing with issues new browsers create and putting stuff in the marketplace. We believe this. This makes a meaningful name.
C5 doesn’t help us, it hurts us. Yes, it sounds memorable, but you can’t say for what. Are you thinking of a jet? a car? our software? Who knows. There’s no reason for us to invest our hard earned money and time into creating a brand that is so innocuous that it means something different to every person who hears it.
So we went back to the drawing board. What would work in the same footprint, but get across some of the real brand around concrete5? Our mission is to make running a website easy. The in-context editing experience is very hands-on and tactile. A regular human can use concrete5 without any real training, we want you to reach out and play with your website in a DIY atmosphere.. what says all of that??? Well the human hand of course! (thanks to my wife on this one..) It’s got 5 fingers, it kinda makes a C when you hold it out, it feels like you can reach out and grab the stuff on your website and change it which is just what concrete5 lets you do…
So without further ado, I present our new logo!
High five!
Nice work
Ryan
9 Mar 09 at 10:59 am
Love it! – Might even love it more if it wasn’t contained in the block and the new hand “mark” was enlarged. The hand mark is the real identifier here and is slightly overpowered by the box, imo.
Either way – nice mark and a nice “save”
Kel
9 Mar 09 at 11:17 am
That is a really nice logo. Congratulations.
Jim S.
9 Mar 09 at 1:31 pm
AWESOME!
But when Concrete6 comes out will you add a finger?
D-Man
9 Mar 09 at 9:10 pm
Great new logo, and a great move, c5 was useful for twitter, but yeah stick with concrete. People will most probably shorten it, like WP (Wordpress), but keeping the brand as Concrete5 seems like a good move to me.
Richard S Davies
10 Mar 09 at 10:26 am
thx!
there will never be v6. we’re gonna get it perfect with this one..
Franz
10 Mar 09 at 11:01 pm
And no one has mentioned that this is sort of what your handprint would look like in concrete! Which, btw, is why I do like the box that it is in – sorta looks like a concrete slab.
(Next gen will be Concrete10, with two hands…)
Jeff
14 Mar 09 at 6:44 am
Great logo… really pulls the product and brand together and makes it solid.
Mych
14 Mar 09 at 2:58 pm
Coolness. But now you’re going to get sued by Teva for copying their “hand logo”
proee
17 Mar 09 at 11:48 am
nah: its pretty different than that… also somewhat different from secondlife’s logo..
regardless – those are clearly completely different businesses, so there’s no issue.
Franz
17 Mar 09 at 7:05 pm
i like the logo and I think you’re being wise about the whole C5 issue but the new hand also looks eerily similar to secondlife.com ’s logo which is the world’s biggest virtual world. Just make sure the concrete5 word stays close and comfy.
Mario
24 Mar 09 at 3:58 pm
edit: SL is not bigger than WoW (so i guess that’s a misstatement) but you know what I mean I hope.
Mario
24 Mar 09 at 3:59 pm
“thx!
there will never be v6. we’re gonna get it perfect with this one..”
Franz
If only software were like this
I can’t think of a single popular open source project where development stops because the product is now perfect!
OllieR
26 Mar 09 at 7:09 am
NICE move – I love the new logo, I dare say any of your users would be confusing it with Teva …they maybe wearing them while using Concrete5 but not buying it for their feet!!
Give me a call will you?
Dylan
26 Mar 09 at 1:18 pm
pkzip basically stopped.
gif spec basically stopped.
Transmit (not OS) has basically stopped.
I dunno, I do of course recognize with the evolving state of browsers, we’ll constantly be making interface tweaks – and I’m not saying we’re anywhere close… BUT – no, i don’t expect to throw everything out and start over again (ie: Mambo->Joomla.) The reason I feel pretty comfortable saying that is because we spent 5 years doing just that with versions 1-4 of concrete CMS. I think we’ve got a few key elements to round out, and a lot of marketplace/community building to do – but we’re not gonna sit around and have committees and splinter groups exploring new ways to solve the same problem.. Sometimes cracking eggs is just cracking eggs.
I think its a pretty important point, and I think I’m gonna go back and touch on it in our philosophy page more.. We’re trying to keep the core code light, to the point, and perfect. That’s a lofty goal for sure, and yes, we will probably always be halving the distance.. but at some point.. 99.99999% of the way there is “done”.
Franz
29 Mar 09 at 9:21 pm
Love it! Great work!
Nathan D, Olmscheid
1 Apr 09 at 6:14 pm
“when concrete5 is more popular than Drupal”
…and it will be!
MarcM
7 Apr 09 at 11:26 am
It is very ok! Web 2.0 style.
Wieshka
5 May 09 at 3:40 pm
If this is the logo for concrete5, I want to see the logo for concrete1… What’s THAT logo look like
JP
22 Jun 09 at 12:59 pm
I honestly dislike the logo, IT TOTALLY LOOKS LIKE SECOND LIFE LOGO:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&um=1&q=second+life+logo&revid=2061363428&ei=vhFeSvXBCMuwlAeWnZjYDA&sa=X&oi=revisions_inline&resnum=0&ct=broad-revision&cd=1
For your information Second Life is the Biggest virtual world where massive people log in to socialize.
If you guys want, i could give the logo a try in various styles (vector format)
ATIX
15 Jul 09 at 10:45 am
yeah we know what second life is.
doesn’t compete – different space.. not an issue..
strangely, they got to a similar design motif because they wanted to express the idea that anyone can make something with their platform..
Franz
15 Jul 09 at 2:35 pm