After I mentioned the logo I’m creating for Caidy, Matthew Turland casually mentioned that Phergie could use a logo. Phergie is open source IRC bot written in PHP (My non-technical friends’ eyes have glazed over about now). The important part is that is open source and a PHPWomen.org sponsored project, so worthy of more than the limited effort I could put into a logo project. A logo request that combines wildly complex software development and diversity? How could I say no?

Since my day job is to create huge monstrous websites, it was good exercise to work on the subtle intricacies of a logo. To practice things I actually went to college for. Because my last logo for a client was several years ago, this project gave me an opportunity to judge my time and process in logo development. Yes, I do take this stuff serious (so serious, I won’t be showing the embarrassing thumbnails for this project because they sucked).

This project took a little over a month to complete. Mostly because of a vacation and the pressures of work. Actual hourly logged time is around 10 hours including research and sketches. The typography for the logo uses the Midiet typeface by Yamaoka Yasuhiro of www.yoworks.com. I had plans for a hand-drawn logo-type, but Midiet fit the project so well and had an open use copyright. The face sketch is digitally drawn with my recently acquired Intuous4 Bluetooth tablet. I approached this project with a low budget, so I started with black and white versions that would still be legible when reversed.

Matt’s notes were very clear about the aspects of the project and it’s statements of diversity. Colors were examined that would relate to the branding for PHP and/or for PHPWomen. A screen of a color close the PHPWomen colors won out in the end.