You can submit as many different designs as you want. The remainder of this document should give you a better idea of what we are looking for in a new logo.

Here is a picture of our current coffee cup logo:

We are more about live music than we are about coffee. Most of the general public does not know that there is a difference between a coffeehouse and a coffee shop so we need to keep that in mind as we move forward with a new logo design. We want to move away from any coffee related images in our logo and try to convey a feeling of what a coffeehouse is all about; Live music, mostly acoustic, and warm, friendly atmosphere.

If you do not already understand the difference between a coffee shop and a coffeehouse, here's a quick explanation:

A coffee shop is usually a for-profit business whose main focus is to sell coffee and pastries. They may occasionally have open mics and book local performers.

A coffeehouse is usually a non-profit organization whose main focus is to present live musical entertainment. The performers can range from local to national, to international. The music is usually (but not always) acoustic. A coffeehouse is often held in a church due to the availability of a large hall and a willing pool of volunteers. But the coffeehouse is usually a separate activity from the church and is not used to promote religious views or recruit membership to the church. A coffeehouse will usually sell coffee, tea, and pastries to help cover their overhead but this is not the main focus of their business.

If you include a picture of a guitar in your proposed logo design, please make it an acoustic guitar rather than an electric. Although our coffeehouses do occasionally book people who play electric guitar, most of our performers play acoustic instruments.

The picture of a girl playing the guitar that we chose for the BACHA brochure is a much better representation of the coffeehouse experience than the coffee cup logo. Even though we present a wide variety of musical styles at our coffeehouses, most of the shows that our member venues book are singer/songwriters. A picture of a person playing an acoustic guitar is a very good representation of what our venues have to offer.

But that is a public domain image so we can not claim exclusive rights to use it as our logo. It is also a Pixel based image, (basically just a scan of a drawing). Unless you do a really high quality scan of the original artwork, a Pixel based image will not have enough resolution to look good when you blow it up large enough to fill up a sign or banner.

The other type of logo is a vector based image created with a vector based drawing software package (like Adobe Illustrator for example). A vector based image can be scaled up to infinity without losing any resolution. We will accept either format (vector based or freehand drawing) for the contest. But if you decide to go with a freehand drawing, make sure that it fills up an 8 1/2" by 11" piece of paper so that we can get the maximum resolution when we scan it in.

We are more interested in choosing a good concept even if it has to be later redrawn. But obviously, a good drawing will increase your chances of winning.

If you come up with a vector based drawing, give us a low to medium resolution copy for the contest entry. If we choose your design, we will ask for a high resolution image or the original vector based source file in exchange for the prize money.

As we improve our website and logo, we would also like to think about improving our name. If you look up the word coffeehouse in the dictionary, you will see that it is one word, not two. We really should have called ourselves BACA. That would have also spelled out the correct pronunciation (ba ca rather than botch a).

The letters A, B, and C are also notes in the musical scale. If we had gone with BACA, we could have come up with a simple but clever logo that looks something like this:

By the way, feel free to steal that idea and improve upon it for your contest submission.

So even though we already have some level of recognition with our current BACHA initials, we are still considering switching over to BACA. In fact we have already reserved the domain names www.bacamusic.org and bacamusic.com even though we have not yet made a final decision in this area. A good logo that incorporates the letters BACA into the design will sway us in the direction of switching over to the new initials.

• The top banner of our new web site design
• A scaled down banner for other web sites to use to link to our site
• The front of our brochure
• A large banner to be displayed at BACHA events (possibly the WUMB music fest coffeehouse stage for example)
• BACHA tee-shirts

The Nike Logo is a good example of a simple design:

It is easily recognizable. It can be easily drawn using a vector based drawing software package. It can be scaled up to fit a large billboard or it can be scaled down to fit on a pen or keychain. But it is pretty boring.

By contrast, a complex design looks great on a tee-shirt:

But they are barely recognizable if you try to scale them down to fit on a pen or key chain:

Pens and key chains are not high on our list of priorities but it would be nice to have a tee-shirt that people would want to buy and wear. It's free publicity for us whenever someone wears a shirt with our logo on it.

The two logos shown above were probably freehand drawings that were scanned in to digitize them. The following is an example of a vector based image that is less complex than the freehand drawings but more complex than the simple Nike logo design:

This is a good compromise but it requires a good level of skill in using a vector based drawing software package.

While we are on the subject of simple vs. complex logos, it's very interesting to study the evolution of the Warner Brothers logo:

You can see that from 1967 to 1984, they tried to migrate towards a simpler design but eventually reverted back to the more complex design from the 1930's and 1940's. This is probably because the more complex design is more impressive when being projected onto the silver screen.

But logo designs don't have to be overly complex to get the point across. The Woodstock logo is a perfect example of this:

Notice how these logos mostly use cold colors like blues and greens. We want to portray our coffeehouses as warm, friendly, inviting places. The look and feel of whatever logo we choose will probably be propagated to other aspects of our new website design so we will want to go with warmer colors and a more friendly design.

Logos can incorporate the name of the company into the design (like the IBM logo) or be a pure pictorial drawing (like the Bell Telephone logo). The pictorial drawings are somewhat preferable because we would have more control over the size of the text if it were separate from the logo. But we would also consider a well integrated text/pictorial design like the Rose Garden logo shown below.

It should also be noted at this point that we want to appeal to the general public, not just to the existing folk music fan base. So we should try to avoid any religious or political overtones in the design.

This is a stunningly beautiful design that is not overly complicated. It looks great on a web page, on a banner and on a tee-shirt.

Here is the same logo without the colors:

It is very useful to have a version of the logo without the colors in case you want to print up some two color tee-shirts. We strongly recommend that you start with a black and white image, make a copy, and then add colors to the copy so that you can submit both the colored and non-colored versions to the contest.

This is a very simple (but artistic) picture of someone playing guitar. It is very typical of one aspect of the coffeehouse experience.