That was the challenge for the Startup Weekend Genève (Geneva) 2010. The concept of the Startup Weekend is to pitch an idea, build a team, and start a business in a weekend. After hearing some ideas I decided to join team 31 as were by far the most enthusiastic about their project, and passion is everything right?
The project was to build an application to search personal history across multiple social sites like facebook, tweeter, etc etc. Sounded good and immediately an idea popped in my mind for the design part. Search my social media = search myself = stick man with a magnifying glass.
After some sketches I was pretty confident with one solution by friday night and thought I would have a nice and slow weekend with plenty of time to develop my logo. But we didn’t have a name yet. Project 31 wouldn’t make it as a name, and after spending Saturday morning creating a business plan and throwing ideas for the name, we came up with the catchy BackInMind. Perfect name, but ups, my “perfect” logo was now useless. The shift from “search my something” to “something in my mind” made my first visual concept useless. Lesson number one in design 101, don’t go to the sketch board before having a strong name and concept..
Time was flying, and I still had to come up with a logo + motion to be ready by Sunday noon, ready for the final presentation along with a working prototype of the app (built by our developers) and a really nice pitch.
Somehow I came up with this in about two hours:
And with this with an extra 4 (all done with an EEE netbook!!!)
There was no research, no experimenting, no time to mature the ideas, and no testing of the visual identity. In a nutshell; a neat experience on how not to do design but still manage to get something cool and have a lot of fun in the end!