Congratulations to David for his strong designs, and thanks to everyone who participated for your creativity and thoughtful designs. This was an inspirational process - and fun too.

As for the brief. There was no "break". Sorry if the ideas about repeating patterns etc were read as MANDATORY. You'll note that I worded them as things to think about. And in any case, my thoughts on Gestalt did play strongly into the decision. David's word-bubble design will be used in a variety of different ways in my presentations - including as a set of repeating gestalt patterns.

And, while the word-bubble itself isn't unique - there are lots of logos that are using it now - it was actually the emphasis the design placed on the word "DIFFER" that stuck with us after we initially gravitated towards David's icon with the 4 bubbles in a square. And it reminded us that DIFFER-ing is really what we want people to see / notice / remember about the brand.

Again, thanks so much to all, But I need to make honourable mentions of these designers who made us smile and made our decisions much harder: For strong creative icons: ursul.us; ClearVisio; OQ; For very strong wordmarks with clean, elegant icons: agil; Roggy; Lanid.

For the rest, keep at it!

We'll be back,
Dennis
(The Big DIFFER)

If this helps at all, here are a few branding concept slides that I use ALL the time in my presentations that may provide some visual ideas (FLASH ANIMATION of a PPT deck).

http://www.begtodiffer.com/designcontest/

Particularly the brand as a "gestalt" - or an image that our brain forms to make sense of a repeating pattern. This is really key to my philosophy of branding.

Some more thoughts / guidelines:

1) I'm loving the cartooney-but-stylized / iconic images. These have the most possibilities in terms of creative uses in varius media.

2) It would be interesting to see some of these icons with a bit more depth

3) One of the key places the logo will appear (at least initially) is in the header of my blog http://www.begtodiffer.com/. So if you haven't yet, please visit the site and think about how your design could work across the narrow horizontal strip at the top.

4) I'm liking the look of the word-mark capitalized as either BEG to DIFFER or Beg to DIFFER - begtodiffer is out,

5) DIFFER is really the key word.

6) Please don't change the colour of - or reverse - just one letter in any of the words. The "to" in the middle could be contrasting (or not), but after seeing a few contrasting e's f's and i's, it's not doing anything for me.