Katalabs needs a logo

Katalabs

We are a group of researchers at Stanford University who have been deeply involved in developing the open source http://www.sirikata.com platform for games and virtual worlds. Katalabs is a startup we are launching to do creative projects on the platform.

So far our projects have involved building new technology into a traditional museum exhibit and a music performance that took place across Milan, Stanford, Montana and Sirikata's digital environments (check here: http://www.vimeo.com/6817057). Currently we are building a small collaboration space for distributed teams and teaching.

The idea behind Katalabs is to do contract work for people who want to launch projects on Sirikata. Our services range from [the take this out] high level idea generation with collaborators to the translation of these into operationally functional software.

Our founding team is very diverse ranging from a professor who is a cultural historian to a CS PhD so we span from traditional to very techie. We are considering a tag line of: Old stuff in new ways

Our target audience will most likely be people who feel that technology is changing the reality they operate in. We currently work with a museum director and his team, a concert organizer and the head of a company with a distributed workforce.

These are basically people who are looking for a high end collaborator help them think through how to use technology to break new ground. We identify with our background in a research environment and want to attract tough challenges.

We expect to employ plenty of visuals such as screenshots and videos on our pages to explain the kinds of work we do and feel that something with a darker background might work well to have these things pop.

Our logo will be placed on our Wordpress powered website which we have in progress in a non public place. We are considering having a design project around this later but will use this initial logo design to see if this works for us.

As for practical tips:

We don't have a strong sense of what our logo should look like but hope to iterate and give feedback as this week progresses.

We are not interested in something that looks very web 2.0. Keep in mind the idea of 'Old stuff in new ways' when designing our logo.

We are not really trying to project anything Eastern Asian with the name though we do know what Kata means. The world of 3D has mainly been advanced through computer games and this is not something we want to align ourselves with either. So anything that has a gamey feel would not be what we are looking for.

Fileformat deliverable:

We would prefer the final logo in the following formats:

- CMYK image PDF and Adobe Illustrator AI format
- Layered RGB file in Photoshop PSD and Fireworks PNG format.
- JPEG

Should this not be possible for you then please flag this as you submit your design.