BestEdgeIT logo design

BestEdgeIT or Best Edge IT or... What looks best

BestEdge IT will offer IT guidance to small and middle sized businesses, highlighting a tailored approach rather than the packaged products and services offered by large consulting firms. BestEdge IT focuses on solving problems rather than selling products, constantly considering the real needs of customers and their visions of the future..

Business Philosophy: Empathy before persuasion, partnership and proactive consulting before traditional one-way sales. Focusing on our core competencies is important as well as allowing our clients to focus on theirs.
Me and a buddy are starting an IT centric consulting firm. We are focusing on being a more proactive firm instead of primarily reactive. We also have a little bit of a sustainable approach however that is not our focus.

BestEdge IT harnesses the IT problem solving and business process analysis skills of key employees to offer clients a tailored, valuable partnership. Our most salient strengths are intimate business to business relationships and an approach to IT consulting that scales well to smaller clients for whom cost, implementation simplicity, and usability are vital success factors.

Small and middle sized businesses in the Puget Sound Region (initially), customers further from home in the later stages of business development when products and services that can be managed remotely are well established, tested and evolved, scalable.

We do not want something that is real techie or sterile looking. We want something that is flat and not 3D. We are an IT consulting company but don't want the logo to look all circuit board like.

1. No shine, no 3-D effect, no shadowing, minimal number of colors. I really like the non glossy pantone colors
2. Natural, organic colors, focusing on subtlety before POP and sparkle
3. Compact and easily readable even when printed onto a business card
4. No cartoons or cartoony looking designs
5. The logo should not lean to heavily on the letters because we want the logo to be able to stand on its own in the future but not be the primary focus when looking at both the logo and type.
6. Simple and does not look like it was produced using a logo design program.
7. Typeface and logo should not be bold or flashy.
8. Should be able to scale down to about a 1/4 inch by 3/4 inch (roughly) and be able to scale up to tradeshow banner booth size.

Example logos along the lines of what we are looking for: Goodman Masson.com , Unipattern.com, etc...

I have attached a failed attempt to design our logo. The ones that we liked the most but did not choose where designs #3 and #5. We also did not like the glossy 3d look and we do not like gradients.