A local community group leader remembered that I used an application to create icons for my business website www.BlueCognition.com and asked if I could use the same application to create a logo for the group. I am not a designer or very artistic but I do know how to use the programs I own pretty well.

The request for the logo started simply enough with the acronym SEVDNUG which means the Southeast Valley .Net Users Group and maybe a cactus or something desert like. My first shot at the logo was not too bad, so we started the process of narrowing 10 logos down to two.

First Drafts

As you can see, I was lucky to find a good graphic of a cactus, and with some text and effects, I was able to give him a couple of nice examples. The price for the clip art cactus was reasonable and is well worth the cost to get a good final product, especially from an artistically challenge color blind developer.

There are a few logo maker applications available on the internet like Laughing Birds Logo Maker and Logo Studio for the Mac. I like using Expressions Design from Microsoft because of the great tools and many effects. The numerous fonts also made designing a logo easier.

And yes; I do plan on keeping my day job.

Except for battleship grey, how does a color blind person pick colors for a user interface? Well, being color blind myself, I use a color chart like the one found in this blog post. This chart of colors was reproduced from Microsoft MSDN documentation for the benefit of the color blind because it was the only chart that I have found to have a corresponding name to each color. I need to know if something is in the brown or green family and it helps to have a descriptive color name to go along with the Hex value and color swatch

In some cases, the names of the colors are not so helpful, like gainsboro or goldenrod. What color is gainsboro? How would you describe the color to a color blind person? I have simple taste when it  come to colors and I basically stick with the 16 box of crayola crayons. In this new world of Ux is king, what is a color blind developer to do? I say hire a dev that loves the Ux and defer to him, or find a Ux that you like and copy the colors.

My blog colors are using my current Visual Studio IDE color settings. I think I did a good job on the colors, but my wife was the ultimate approver on the final colors.

Colors

Greyscale