Today I came across some of the original concepts for the Undead Labs logo. Now of course I have to bury the concepts that didn’t make the cut, because conventional marketing wisdom says that we shouldn’t ever show them because we might risk “confusing the consumer.”
Ugh. The word “consumer” makes me think of buying toilet paper and shampoo at Safeway on the weekend. But if you are interested enough in what we are doing to hang around on a website for a pre-release zombie-survival game, then you’re not a consumer; you’re a gamer, through and through.
And I also suspect that, rather than being hopelessly confused and helpless when exposed to the complex horror of logo concepts that we decided weren’t just right, you might think it’s kind of cool to actually see how we decided on the final Undead Labs logo.
Gamers. I love those guys.
When I was setting up the Lab back in November 2009, I knew I wanted a punchy, distinct logo to go with our — personal opinion here — awesome studio name. The first person I talked to was James McMillan. James is a fantastic game artist, a pure zombie enthusiast, and is now a core member of the Undead Labs development team. You’ll be hearing more about James soon, but for now suffice it say that he was my go-to guy for initial logo ideas.
After we talked about some rough ideas, James took a few hours and created this:
Awesome! But building brands and logos is a complex art that needs to factor in usage in all kinds of harsh environments like black-and-white print, postage-stamp sizing, readability from a distance, silhouette recognizability, reusable elements (like the little vial shapes used on our website), color, tone, cultural sensitivities… the list is almost endless. In short, now that we had a general direction it was time to bring in the pros.
Based on glowing referrals from some of my marketing buddies, I contacted the excellent team at Ten Gun Design and turned them loose on it. I asked them to riff on James’s logo, but to also branch out and throw in some ideas of their own based on my description of the studio and games we wanted to build. A few days later the Ten Gun team visited me at the Lab and presented these:
Wow. There are some awesome logos in here. My particular favorite is the zombie coming out of the sludge barrel. You can also clearly see Ten Gun’s take on James’s original logo concept.
Of course, the one that stole our hearts was the one we ultimately decided to enshrine as the official Undead Labs logo.
This logo had it all: zombies, body parts, laboratory equipment, rushed research (the hastily applied green tape), and an unique and instantly recognizable shape.
About that shape, and its possible resemblance to a certain hand gesture…
Okay, time to come clean on this. Seriously, I never noticed it, nor did anyone else working on it. I can only guess that we were just too close to it, and were unable to step back and look at it with fresh eyes. I found out about it the day we launched the Undead Labs website when I received a text from a number I didn’t know that read, “Who are you flipping off?”
Was I surprised? Absolutely. I mean, there’s nobody I want to flip off so badly that I’d commit the entire company logo to the task. But am I going to change it now that I know?
Hell no.
Jeff