My place of employment, Rainforest Action Network (RAN), recently launched a youth network. Here's the step-by-step of how we came up with the logo.

Step 1: Finding a name.

This part didn't involve me. My co-worker Levana had already canvassed the multitudinous youth groups that we work with at various trainings, gatherings, and presentations. The name RYSE, possibly but not necessarily an acronym for RAN Youth Sustaining the Earth, rose to the top (no pun intended). Kids liked it, despite—or perhaps due to—its deliberate misspelling.

Step 2: Crafting a brand.

The next step was to gather adjectives that would describe the kind of identity that we wished to create for RYSE. Since it's a youth network (as in high school age), a lot of the RAN staff excused themselves from this step, leaving the younger members to generate the list. The list of adjectives for the logo ended up being a good mix of useful (doodleable, authentic, upward movement) and generic (hip, cool, smooth).

Step 3: Casting a wide net.

The design process now on my plate, it seemed right to start with a brainstorm. Based on the list of adjectives I received, I put together these twelve designs. Having just read "The Wisdom of Crowds" on my holiday train ride, I was very wary of the process turning into a consensus-based design by committee, turning the logo to poop.

Step 4: Raising the bar.

Instead of circling up and talking through our opinions, the team was asked to vote on their three favorites without mutual consultation. The idea was that the least inspired logos would quietly drop out of the race. That's indeed what happened, and we ended up with these. There were still too many to send to our youth groups, so next was a quick "embarrassment vote" to remove the ones we didn't even want the youth to consider.

Step 5: Getting feedback.

Now we were down to five designs, which we felt were good enough to send back to our youth allies for consideration. We asked for both word associations (so we could match them to our list) and Favorite/Least Favorite votes from them. Though the voting for Favorite showed a dead tie across all the logos, the word associations we got back were priceless. "Skyward" and "empowering" were used to describe one, while another just received "weak". The silver bullet was the feedback that one of our activists would, "totally wear a t-shirt with that one on it."

Step 6: Closing in.

This next step involved tweaking the design chosen from the feedback through multiple variations to see if there were other treatments that we preferred. Some people had asked beforehand if we could see this one like this or that one like that, but I kept punting the tweaking until after we had gotten a little closer to a decision—no sense in making multiple versions of a bad logo, especially when we're crunched for time.

Step 7: The devil's in the details.

Everyone was pretty sure that we had found our logo at this point and all that remained was the tweaking, fitting, squishing, and squeezing of what I considering a rough "scribble", albeit digital, into the "final" version. Sending these details around for a final vote, most of the comments were in the family of, "they all look great" or "those are very small differences, any are fine". Only a few people actually kept voting this far into the process.

Step 8: The new RYSE logo.

I took the final logo and did all the technical things in Illustrator to make it feel more "final", like stroking borders, expanding appearances, and simplifying paths. The vectors went from about 1300 points of complex paths to about 300 points of much simpler paths—stripped for export if you will. Then I had a little fun exploring what it might look like in a two-color piece and made the birth announcement to the team. We had a new logo.

The whole process took just about two weeks, not including the casual conversations and market research that led to the name in the first place. I'm quite pleased with the logo, especially that we managed to include so many voices—like the youth we've been working with (it's their logo, after all)—while keeping the process from slipping into groupthink and lowest-common-denominatorism. Bravo, my inner Creative Director.