My proposal for the MBL Logo

Today, my second term holidays start and I had some time on my hands. So, I decided to create a logo for the Mauritius Blog List. For those who don’t know, The Mauritius Blog List (MBL) is a website created and maintained by Bruno(@blebon) which aims to aggregate all the posts by Mauritian bloggers and display it on a single page. You could say it’s a huge blogroll on steroids. :)

Design Process

I opened up Fireworks and thought about it. In my honest opinion, a logo should be something that conveys the aim/purpose of a product or service (of course, there are some exceptions).

I analyzed the name: Mauritius Blog List. It consists of 2 parts: ‘Mauritius’ and ‘Blog List’. I decided that I should start with the 2nd part.

I created a new 512×512 canvas, drew some black rectangles and positioned them at equal distance:

That’s the ‘blog list’ part.

I added the letters. I used Meta Normal Caps, one of my favorite fonts:

Then I removed some parts of the rectangles to make some space around the letters:

Colors

I had finished the main part, the rest were details. The colors I chose were (obviously) red, blue, yellow and green; which are the colors of the Mauritian flag:

Effects

To make the logo more “web 2.0″-y I applied some effects.

First of all, I added a ‘glass’ overlay:

Secondly, a drop shadow. This gave the logo a sense of depth:

The difference that 2 small effects can cause is simply amazing!

Before posting the logo, I asked for Sun‘s opinions and suggestions and he told me that the ‘M’ could be better. I changed its font to Helvetica and here’s the result:

Sun was right! It’s better.

Favicon

Since it’s a website, it should have a favicon.

A 32×32 canvas and some minutes later:

Badge

Since people who are members of the MBL may want to include a link to it on their blog, I created this badge:

Finished Logo

Here’s the finished logo, it’s transparent and can be used on any background:

Download

I’ve included all the source files (Fireworks *.pngs) and all the normal images (Flattened *.pngs) in a Zipped file. You can download it here.