While Ask Jeeves was undergoing its first major redesign, the Art Director of the company decided that it was time to revisit the company logo. The company was also turning from a Service Mark (denoted by the "SM" after all uses of the logo and company name) to a Registered Trademark (with a circled "R"). The original logo, while still very prominent as a brand and visual identity, had many inconsistencies in its shape. As the lettering continues from left to right, each character became wider and shorter, with an axis progressively tilted more clockwise than the letter preceding it. At large sizes, these problems merely made the logo quirky and fun in a lopsided way, but at very small sizes, especially on websites, the letterforms often became blobs. I was given the task of coming up with some preliminary ideas, and then following through to all final executions.

During the initial brainstorming phase, I tried several variations that were different from the current logo. Some positioned the word "Ask" above the word "Jeeves", others used the same baseline for both words. I pursued some slight variations in color, including the use of an alternate hue for the beveled edges of the letterforms, instead of the gray and white of the original.

The first drafts were then shown to test groups, and of course some family members of Jeeves employees, including children (who were usually the best and most succinct critics). Some problems with the design were pointed and noted, such as the vertical column design, which had the word "Ask" above "Jeeves", but which made the capital "J" and the oval around "Ask" look like an umbrella to many. The use of anything but white in the beveled edge of the word "Jeeves" made the letterforms blurry at small sizes. Existing users of the site who were in these focus groups did not recognize the logo in other color palettes (blue instead of red, etc.) and preferred what they were used to seeing, even though they liked the changes in shape. Overall, the existing color scheme was preferable, although we did add a version of the logo for use on medium-gray to 100% black backgrounds.

I then began correcting my original first draft using an isometric perspective grid to line up the edges of letters, as seen to the left here. I used just the right angles for small sizes (i.e. under 1" and 150 pixels on a webpage) so that the lines did not blur but stayed as black as possible. I also added semi-serifs to the edges of the letters to lead the eye from one character to another better than sans-serif type. The counters of the capital "A" and the lower-case "e" were widened to keep them from turning into blobs at reduced sizes. The outlines of the word "Jeeves" were given more width, to show up better at all levels of magnification. As a result, the logo became crisp, professional, more readable, and had even more of a style to it than the original. See below for comparison.

I used several techniques to create the first drafts of the company logo, including traditional lettering brushes,which gave the best results after sketching original ideas with graphite. Macromedia Freehand and Adobe Illustrator were my programs of choice. The original logo only existed as a raster image and not in vector format, and as a result was very large & inconvenient when sending to outside vendors and advertisers, and on large signs it needed to be re-shot! I wanted to give the company the flexibility and freedom from large file sizes that vectors offer. As a plus, the logo can easily be used in vector animation programs such as Flash and 3DSMax by simply importing it, with no tracing necessary.

Ask Jeeves.com visual identity New logo created by myself above, old logo sheet below that. New logo created by myself above, old logo sheet below for comparison. Note how the outlines of the letters nearly disappear, compared to the solidity of the new design: