A logo bug?! That’s my favorite thing I’ve learned all week.
Also, is this the first time we’ve seen the proofgrade bug (Heh. Still adorably hilarious) or am I just oblivious?
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“Glowforge table saw” EL oh EL
Hm… We print it on Proofgrade materials, but you may be right! I don’t know that we’ve published it online before.
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Not that I’ve ever seen. But, oh look! An emoticon… 
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Ok, I’m going to just come out and say I don’t “get” the Proofgrade bug: 
Hints for the metaphor-challenged?
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It’s really designed to work with the text. @Tony can speak to the visual inspiration behind it. To me, it’s a box, or a stack of material, or pieces of a project being assembled.
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Looks like something Escher designed.
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Drunk Escher was my thought. 
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I see it as a hopper with the front gate of the hopper opened up to allow the items inside to come out.
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I must admit, I’m with the others: I’m desperate to understand the underpinning idea for the metaphor of that design. I don’t get it.
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I didn’t design it myself. I’ve designed logos but recognize it as a skill that comes with practice… We’ve worked with pros for both of the logos.
I think the worst logos are often (but not always) literal. We could have a glowing anvil for our logo-- thankfully, we do not.
Usually creating a logo is all about feelings/impressions/etc. For proofgrade, some of the feelings that we wanted to impart were around geometry/precision with a bit of whimsey (with a 3D leaning-- conveying the “potential of working in planes”). Some other feelings were around “officialness” (think a seal, currency, stamp of approval)… There’s tremendous effort sourcing/testing the perfect material in the ocean of stuff out there-- we want a proofgrade “stamp” to really mean something.
Of course, the delightful thing about impressions is that we all have different ones when we look at a thing. We did spot surveys with early logo ideas-- I remember one of the more “serious” logos in my mind resulted in two people saying “reminds me of Nintendo”.
I think a good logo is an (somewhat) empty vessel that can be imbued with the brand you earn (I once heard brand defined as “brand is what your customers think when they see/use your products”).
The name Apple was chosen as an ultimatum (“If we can’t come up with a better name, we’re calling this damn company Apple!”), and it’s current logo is essentially a silhouette of the goofy rainbow apple the started with. The iconic Nike swoosh was drawn by an art student for $1500. Google and Yahoo were terrible names/brands at the start. Now when we see these brands, they are rich with meaning.
Lastly, I’ll say that we’re still a pretty small company with a lot to do. I don’t know if a multi-month six-figure logo effort would result in a more perfect logo, but I do know that it’d take resources away from things that create more value for you folks. Onward!
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Yeah, but you did go with a light bulb in the general shape of a G. That’s still pretty literal. Don’t get me wrong, I like it. It’s… light… fun… and invokes, to me, a sense of creativity.
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Well said. I have found that a logo works when it works, and the proof is in the pudding, so to speak – and a 6 figure design team will not necessarily come up with anything better than the person who doodles something on the back of a napkin. Everyone may see it differently, and opinions are as prolific as…but in the end, do we associate it with the product and company? Initially, no one would associate a norse two tailed mermaid logo and the name of a Melville character with coffee, but today… 
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Great response, @tony. I’m currently dealing with a trademark lawyer for my business and have thought long and hard about my logo. It’s fairly literal. I designed the first version over about a month of refinements. A couple years later, I wanted to simplify it and, after thinking about it for a day or two, the image became clear in my head and I spent about two hours creating the current version. Before talking to the trademark lawyer, I spot surveyed friends, customers, and business associates about a possible change in the business name and logo and everyone was almost unanimous that what I have been using for the last two years works. So I’m sticking with it.
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@Tony, with an inspired captive audience here who’s blood courses with creativity , I would have been tempted to open a forum competition for a logo design with say a $50 - $100 prize in the Glowforge store should a design be chosen.
The population would also be a fair size voting sample for how a design is received publicly.
It’s just possible that a shot in the dark could hit the target.
Thanks for the insight, and yes - Onward! 
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The Proofgrade logo looks to me like a very stylized “G”…
I like it a lot!
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It wasn’t meant as a criticism. I like Escher’s work.
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Crazy Glowforge Logo Trivia-- he’d first presented it as this:
(G!)
Then he turned it 45 degrees and was excited because it evoked precision / pinpoint / focus /etc. The designer who did it never mentioned a lightbulb in presenting it to us and not a single person on the review team noticed it either (or at least not that I recall). I think we all we focused on the G.
(deep apologies-- I’m a designer with a psychology degree!)
One of my favorite psych studies is called tappers and listeners.
The asked one subject to tap out a song with a pencil (Happy Birthday would go “tap t-tap tap tap taaaaap”, etc). The asked a second subject to guess what song they were tapping and write it on a piece of paper. They then asked the first subject what % o the time subject two would be correct.
Subject 1 guessed that, on average, 50% of people would successfully guess the song.
The actual result was 2.5%.
(https://hbr.org/2006/12/the-curse-of-knowledge;at/1)
The tapper can hear the song in their head and literally can’t imagine that another person wouldn’t be able to “hear” it. So much of human communication failure can be explained by this!
Or maybe it was more like an invisible gorilla ( http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html )
Anyhoo, I think we had full symphony in our head (G + a bunch of other things we’d been stewing on) and by the time we saw the lightbulb orientation, our heads were too full to notice that maybe? I’m absolutely delighted now that you mention it to me. 
Okay, ya’ll are too fun to talk to. Back to lasers!
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To me, the logo looks like a pretty literal translation of the “P” and “G”, as in ProofGrade.
Logo design is one of those things that people, by and large, just don’t “get”.
On one hand, you see large companies spending 6 or 7 figures for logo remodeling, and even other designers are left thinking “Oh hell, I could have done that for a hundredth of the cost!” Meanwhile, the design firm that produced the logo has come up with a very elaborate backstory to the meaning and iteration of the design process, that led to the final result. They also produce something that hardly anyone else outside of Management and Legal will ever see, which is the Design & Use guidelines, specifying rules for size, color, placement, etc. for nearly every conceivable use of the artwork, be it print, web, licensed products, etc.
On the opposite end of the spectrum you have the local graphic designer who struggles to pull $300 for a logo design because your average local sole proprietorship business has zero budget for operating, much less a “luxury” like a logo. But even $300 is a shot in the foot because of design time, plus consultation with the customer and then the impending revisions.
Then all parties get tired of the whole process so somebody slaps down some Helvetica Bold Italic, calls it good, and you end up with a Microsoft logo. Then some time later they decide to update the “logo” to the Segoe font. Of course now they spent a fortune for that change, because literally every aspect of the company’s media and identity had to change, and they did it so smoothly that the public didn’t even notice it happened.
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