First, I wanted to say thank you so, so, so much for all the different designs you posted...you truly made the work of picking a winning icon very difficult.

This said, we presented the best picks to our audience of financial advisers and then went with nejikun's design.

This, of course, reflects in no way on the beauty and skill displayed in the designs I had to eliminate.

Unfortunately, we had to pick one and this was it.

Hi everybody, I just got through my latest pass of all your fine work. A couple of comments:

1. Thank you for responding to my request to alter the bird to have a more 'alert' appearance. This is a super-important part of our brand message.
2. We've started circulating the icons to some of our end users for their reactions...I'll apologize in advance for any of the designs that are uncerimoniously eliminated. I hate this part of the process and it obviously is not a comment on the quality of the work, itself. I really do appreciate it.

For those icons that remain, I did want to point out why I have kept some of them:

#116 achieves a couple of goals:

1. It is easy to replace our existing logo on the website with this icon. We really do want this to be a painless process to switch to your design.
2. The fullness of the bird and it being perched gives a sense of alertness and almost protectiveness (though, canary's are argueably not the most scary animals in the world!). @grade made a comment, which I'd like to respond to on this topic. It is true that our product is technology heavy, however, we aren't selling technology per se. We are selling security and watchfulness...it is this quality that we want to embody in the logo. We aren't selling to technologists, though I appreciate that as part of this design process that everybody is bringing in interesting philosophical points.

#115 is interesting because it is a more abstract approach to designing the logo. It's probably the most different while still meeting our requirements and for that reason is appreciated.

#104 and #103 - nejikun didn't listen to our request not to integrate the bird into a Q shape, which is lucky for us, since I think a nice job was done. At very least, the design of the bird is very nice.

#97 has also done a very nice job with bird. Of course, we will need to shrink the picture down to be our favicon.ico, so we are concerned about the ability of the icon to scale.

#82 has some of the qualities of #115...a visually pleasing design, as well.

Anyhow, thank you again for your patience as we continue to iterate...we're definitely converging on something we'll be happy with!

Even though #9 isn't my favorite iconic representation of the bird, I really like that the design is staying fairly true to the original icon in terms of there being a bird that is perched (i.e. on alert). Since we are an alert detection system, having a bird that looks like it's paying attention/surveying its surroundings is nice. The name, Qanary, comes from "the canary in a coal mine". I hope that background information is helpful and thank you again to everybody for pitching in their ideas to this project.