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Thanks. That's the thing I was going for. The idea was that it needed to look good in a tiny square as a Facebook profile picture, bigger on a T-Shirt, or really big on a poster. I wanted it to be simple, little more than just the name of the band and a lightning bolt.
I wasn't exactly sure how to combine them, but I started with just writing the word with the lightning bolt behind it, and I already felt that I was most of the way there. I knew I wanted to use Word Art, since it's simple and easy to reproduce, with the words filled in with color, so I found a font that looked good "hollow". I liked how this font has the extra shadow lines built in, giving it a 3-D look. Then it was just a matter of playing with the colors until I liked how they worked with the lightning bolt. Outlining the letters in dark orange had the unexpected but welcomed side effect of changing the lines inside the lettering to the same color.
One of the "professional" designs had the word written
in the lightning bolt, which looked kinda cool, but it was hard to read the word itself. They provided a couple variations on that idea, none of which I really liked. Another design had the word much more stylized; the "F" had a lightning bolt "tail" on it, and the "E" angled up, but had a weird downward curve at the end which made the whole thing remind me of a dick going limp. A third design was just too busy. Lots of colors, and lightning in the background. I have no idea how that could be reproduced, but in graphic design, lots of colors = more money to reproduce.
The one thing that all three of those designs had in common was that they were just so damned fancy that you had trouble reading the word FlashDrive. In my mind, that is the most important point. If someone looks at your logo, which is basically just the name of the band, and it takes them more than a few seconds to even read it, the logo fails. Promoting the band, and the b
rand, is way more important than looking all super-fancy.
I know nothing about design, either, but I looked at the "professional" submissions (we had the first two at that point) and said "Shit, I could come up with something better than that in half an hour in Microsoft Word" and proceeded to do just that. The third submission came in, and it too was just too fancy and silly. Often, simpler really is better.