Now that the forums have been improved, it's time to move onto the next task.

One of the most common criticisms from many visitors has been that the name "Game Remixes" is too generic. Originally chosen because it was the most logical choice, people have argued that the name does not have "branding potential." As a result, I've been consulting with several people to develop a new identity for the site at the same time these other changes were being created. While a decision was made days ago, I couldn't announce it to a wide audience because it was possible that someone might register names to prevent this site from using them.

We are pleased to announce the creation of (remix) squared, where you can find game music powered up. Shredster7 was kind enough to offer some logos, but he wasn't aware of the name change at the time and developed logos for the old name.

Working with whoever is going to be the logo designer, I would like to keep the site's color scheme as unchanged as possible, to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done in this next effort. The site's colors themselves were not specifically criticized by many people (if anyone). However, I do want to change the colors of these forums to be more in line with the color scheme used on the main site, which should not be a difficult task.

After the new logo and new name are published, a print ad campaign will begin at Penn State, with about 500 posters to be plastered across the campus. The last time that was done, there were nearly 100 new users within a week of the ads being posted. I also have $200 in Google Adwords credits that Google mailed me for some reason - while I have never found Adwords to be effective, I might as well use free stuff at the same time.

Thanks to those who are helping with the logo, and if anyone else wants to submit a logo for consideration, feel free to reply. The general criteria are:

-585x110px
-Cannot include copyrighted images like Mario or a SNES, but you can use generic controllers or joysticks that aren't from any particular system
-Transparent background
-"Ank" font used as base (http://gameremixes.com/css/fonts/ank-webfont.ttf)
-Needs to have more to do with games than the current logo (this was a specific criticism of Rize's)
-The current logo is public domain, so you can include it in the new logo or discard it entirely at your choice
-If possible, try to use the same general color scheme as the current site

Note: All links to the old domain name will still function as before, so those who have embedded songs in their websites or linked from other sources do not have to change their links.

I sent you an E-Mail with updated versions of some of the banners last night. Not sure if something prevented them from going through, however.
Should I just upload or link to them here?

Hmmm, I don't see them. I made some adjustments to SpamAssassain last week, so I wonder if I should change them back.

But if you don't mind having your work critiqued, why not post them here? I'm not the only person who can judge good design - I think it would be better to have as many opinions as possible.

Here's round one (fight!) of what I've got so far.

#4 uses Creative Commons licensed images from Wikimedia Commons. The creators of said images are users PJ, Piko, and SdeVries, as well as photographer Roger McLassus.

http://i.imgur.com/Rt1S9.png

http://i.imgur.com/WdnLF.png

http://i.imgur.com/Z2Tvg.png

http://i.imgur.com/1Vfvf.png

http://i.imgur.com/93CkM.png

...oh, for Pete's sake. The sides of 1 and 2 are borked! I'll have to fix them soon...

I really like these logos, even more so than the last batch of Game Remixes logos. They're far better than what I came up with when I was fooling around.

While I was at the gym last night, I was thinking about how many organizations today have transitioned to logos that consist mostly of text. Take facebook, linkedin, and CNN, for example. All of those logos are just text in a special font.

I think #1 and #2 look nice, but they don't address the concern that there is little to do with video games in the logo. #4, I think, is the most difficult to read of all of the images. Since it doesn't have a transparent background, it will make the print campaign much more expensive than it would otherwise be.

So that brings me to #3 and #5. The "pixels" in the back of #3 as well as the joystick conjure up video games very well. And I had never considered underlining the superscript "2" in #5 - that underline adds a lot to the logo. #5 is also good because it is possible to cut off the right side of the logo for t-shirts and posters. Both of those are already acceptable as-is, but I was wondering if you might be willing to see if something even better can be made by doing the following:

-Start with #5
-Incorporate the joystick from #3 somehow
-Change the color of the dots around the waveform to be closer to #3582BC

I don't know if it the result would look even half decent, but I'd be interested in seeing the results. Great job - I didn't realize that it would be this easy!

Ladies and gentlemen, FRANKENBANNER:

http://i.imgur.com/1WMQ1.png

Also, since you mentioned something about T-Shirts, here's a hideously oversized T-Shirt version of said logo.

EDIT: Imgur turned the PNG into a JPEG, so things got kind of ugly. Here's the properly transparent version.

This is awesome. Far better than the current logo. I'll have to ask some other people like DjTheS what they think, but I love it.

The entire thing is great, but of all the things you did, the underlined 2 is probably the most unique idea there in terms of branding. Anywhere there's only room for a small logo, we can just put "r(superscript underlined 2)" in Ank font, and people will know what it means.

Are you interested in adapting the logo for other places? There are three more logos that will be needed:


a favicon.ico to appear in browser tabs[/*:m]
a "back" for the t-shirts and print ads (the stuff on the right side of the logo)[/*:m]
something to go in the embedded song panes to replace the upper left, like this one:[/*:m][/list:u]

Militiae Corneriae

I'm working on some images for those purposes right now... BUT!
The joystick image is licensed under non-commercial use, so I can't use them in the T-Shirt images.
Also note: the person who uploaded said image goes by the nickname SdeVries, so you'll probably want to write that down at the bottom of the page somewhere.

Well, these t-shirts and ads are not designed to be sold, so they are safe under non-commercial use. By t-shirts, I was just thinking of making up a few and giving them to some people to wear when they are out in crowds to get some publicity. Perhaps I'll buy one for you to wear.

But even if we were selling stuff, the site isn't a commercial entity because nobody is making a profit. Any money would simply roll back into operating costs. I think you can use the joystick without any problems.

http://shoemakervillage.org/temp/dev1.jpg

I noticed something after integrating it into the development site. If you look at the above image, the joystick doesn't match the color scheme. The pixels behind "remix" do, and I think we can get away with the lighter "game music powered up" pixels, but the joystick itself might be better off less saturated, to match the navigation bar. Do you agree, or do you think the color difference is minor?

Well, these t-shirts and ads are not designed to be sold, so they are safe under non-commercial use.

Oops. I've already got some designs without the controller uploaded. However, I'd be willing to work it back in somehow if necessary.

...but the joystick itself might be better off less saturated, to match the navigation bar.

ABSOLUTELY, YES. See if this works:

http://i.imgur.com/6iaaW.png

And, here's the Favicon/Small Icon/Misc. image I lazilly slapped together:

http://i.imgur.com/zZCDe.png

Wanted to keep it simple B/C I'm not sure how well an elaborate design would scale down to a 16x16 bookmark icon.

The recolored front and the back of the hypothetical T-Shirt can be seen here and here.

And finally, downloads for transparent versions of the giga-images and the ICO version of the favicon:
FRONT
BACK
FAVICON

Whew... so, what's next? :D

Wow, impressive. For now, I think that I need to catch up in integrating all the changes into the site design. It will probably take me a day or two to replace all the spots where we call the site "game remixes" with remixsquared.

FYI, once I get these ads out, I'll send you a T-shirt with your logo on it, at my expense, since you were so helpful.

When Sunday comes and the name has changed, the next round of tasks is all graphic design. One of the major complaints was that people don't like gridlines. Look at the compo pages for an example of how grids are used. The problem is that, in many cases, tables are the best way of presenting data. Deciding how to handle that is going to be a huge task.

Hey Shred,

If you're up to looking into another problem, take a look at this image:

http://shoemakervillage.org/temp/dev2.png

As you can see, the pages for originals have a different color scheme, closer to #762700. Since the old logo was monochrome, it never clashed with this scheme.

If there were some way to simply tint the entire layer of pixels towards this color, I think the originals pages would look more consistent.

Note: ignore how the text "originals" is out of place. That will be fixed later.

http://i.imgur.com/JQGho.png

I'm having way too much fun with this.

Excellent. I was planning to put the word "originals" over the top of the logo using CSS, but this is far better. I should be able to release this tomorrow if all goes well.

The one thing that's missing is the top of the "embedded songs," the ones that appear in forums. I tried downsizing the "front" t-shirt logo to fit there, but the pixels behind the text make the words too difficult to read when the height is only 28px. I think that we might need a rendering of "remix^2" or "remixsquared" with the black shadow, some width by 28px high, so that the text is legible. You can see the songboxes above for yourself.

Odd. I thought the square R2 icon would work for that?

http://i.imgur.com/iZDf0UR.png

Actually, now that I look at it, just R2 by itself doesn't convey much information. =P

Thanks, Shred - I released the changes to the site. Hopefully, you'll be pleased with what you see. Thanks again for all your work, and I'll be sending you a private message later this week to send you a t-shirt.

I noticed a problem with the back logo for the t-shirt. I created a Word document to run off 500 copies of it for the ad campaign that will begin on Monday. But the edges of the waveform are too bright and probably need to be moved closer to the blue on the site. When that logo is printed on standard white paper and looked at from a distance, you can't see the outline of the waveform at all.

Making the color darker is one option, but another choice is to simply make another copy of the entire image, this time grayscale. Staples has "enhanced black and white" printing for 11 cents/page, while it costs 2.5 times as much to print color images. One would expect grayscale images to draw less attention, but if I can print out 2.5 times as many posters, there might be more visitors because I can put them in more buildings. Your thoughts on the edge color and the grayscale argument are welcome.

I've thought it over for awhile, and come to the conclusion that whether or not to go greyscale or color comes down to the size of the area you're trying to cover is.

If it's an absolutely huge campus, then I'd go with more of the black-and-white signs. However, if you think you can put the signs in easily noticeable and/or heavily crowded areas, then go for the more attention-getting colored signs.

I'd also recommend concentrating *slightly* more on buildings with computer labs or ITCS courses in them. The way I see it, a computer geek is a lot more likely to join the site than a cheerleader.

Finally, here's some remastered versions of the T-Shirt images you asked for:
Recolored T-Shirt Back
Greyscale T-Shirt Front
Greyscale T-Shirt Back

Oh, and BTW, seeing the new site changes in action is freaking awesome. I'm seriously ultra-glad I could help out. :D

Also: I was recently browsing the site when this oddity occurred:

http://i.imgur.com/aFIwQ6G.png

The same thing has happened with every game-tagged song I've checked. Not sure if it's client-side or if the site does that for everyone...

Thanks for pointing out that bug. I just fixed it. I also fixed another thing which you can read about in the other thread.

I myself am amazed at how the banner makes such an enormous difference in the site's appearance. I didn't change a single line in the CSS or a single color elsewhere. People said for a long time that the banner was weak, but there are always so many things that needed to be fixed that I put it off until last. I think I was wrong. Thanks a lot for that.

Did you change a forum setting to hide your name from the member list? I couldn't send you a private message. If you didn't change anything, then I need to spend some time tomorrow researching how phpBB's member list works to figure out why some people are missing.

As to the campus, there are 155 buildings listed on the official map, but I learned when I was still in college that some of them are a waste of time to put stuff in. If I can get there tomorrow, I was thinking of just plastering every single classroom in a four-story building with these signs. There are cork areas above the chalkboards, and bored students have nothing to do but look at the signs for an hour. I can't do that on a Monday, so I'll have to wait until next Sunday if I can't get them printed in time.

I will certainly go to the computer science building, but I think you forgot the most important place of all: the music buildings. There are a ridiculous number of bulletin boards there. Believe it or not, one of the posters here is a professor, so it's not just students that would be targeted.

You can take a look at the proposed advertisements at http://shoemakervillage.org/temp/2013-01_ad.pdf. There's no way I can get them up this weekend, so it looks like I'll have to print them this week and go through the buildings on Saturday or Sunday. There are too many classes on Monday nights, and you end up missing half the rooms.

I have already begun with the Google AdWords campaign and plan to send out an E-Mail to the mailing list soon.