One of the first things you do when you start a business, other than coming up with a name, is coming up with a good logo. Your logo defines you and your service. Starting a paranormal team is no different. The team name and logo tells a potential client or visitor to your website what they might expect and who they might be dealing with. Your logo is very important whether it’s your website, Youtube, Facebook, or any other social media site. And let’s not forget about advertising such as fliers, posters or any other media you can think of. You only get one chance at a first impression so you’d better make it count. Often, a logo can change over time as a team grows into itself and develops its identity. When Fringe Paranormal formed in 2009 we wanted to be different than the other teams out there. We wanted to stand out. As a college graduate with a business degree and a major in marketing, I knew that having a logo was a must.
This is our first logo. We played off of the first letters of our name. FPI…”FBI”. Yes, a bit corny and when we started I wanted a team name that was not an acronym. It seemed that so many teams did and still do have names that function that way, and as I said, we wanted to be different. Looking back, I’m surprised we actually went with this logo as it is on the fringe (pardon the pun) of being an acronym. All in all it was a clean, halfway decent logo but it really didn’t capture the imagination or attention. We had to come up with something more memorable and less “acronymic” (yep, as a director you get to make up words sometimes). So after some thought we came up with a totally different graphic.
This is the second incarnation of the Fringe logo. This is a bit more representative of what we do. We have a hand print which is kind of “sciency” (again, I get to make up words…it’s in my contract. And if it’s not it should be ). There’s an all seeing eye in the center. A pretty cool mystical logo. We were satisfied with this for quite a while. But one day I took a good look at it. Perhaps it was a bit too mystical? That all seeing eye in the palm? Fringe prides it self on being a bit skeptical yet open minded. We have high standards of evidence and don’t utilize psychics on investigations. Yes, this logo was a bit off and didn’t quite capture our essence. But i did like the idea of the palm print. Maybe all we needed to do was modify it just a tad.
So we went back to the drawing board, both figuratively and literally. We made some adjustments and came up with our current and probably final incarnation of the Fringe logo.
This is more like it. Let’s share an aside for just a moment before we continue. There is something special about this graphic that you can’t tell just by looking at it. The writer in me has a bent for twists and turns in plot lines. I like to be surprised. “The Twilight Zone” was my kind of TV show. I also like those little unexpected Easter eggs you sometimes find on a website or in a video game. So when I redid our logo i thought I’d throw my own little twist into the mix. The palm in this graphic is taken from a museum print of the Dali Lama’s hand. The Dali Lama is a spiritual kind of guy to say the least. The “F” is for “Fringe” of course. Combine the two and you have a mixture of the spiritual/paranormal and science/logic. This is the logo that defines us; open minded yet with a healthy dose of skepticism. Will this version change in the future? We may play around with some sort of frame to go around the logo and dress it up a bit but this is it. Once you find your identity you know it.
Take a look at the three graphics below. We were trying to come up with a banner for Shel Gatto’s blog “Down a Dark Trail”. The first two didn’t quite portray what we wanted. We decided on the third. This one captured Shel’s vision. Take a look at all three and contemplate why we dismissed the first two in favor of the third.
So what lesson should we take from all of this? Don’t be in a rush to find the perfect logo for your team. But do have something. The one you do come up with will morph over time to fit you. Running a paranormal team is like running a business: be professional; always be ethical; use business etiquette; and market your team wisely. Remember, if you don’t take your business seriously no one else will. And developing a good logo is serious business.
Fringe Paranormal 