"That would be pretty nice"

Would you pay $1000 for this logo design? We're hoping Henry Copeland of Blogads will.

"And tell them I sent you, and cause me to win $300. That would be pretty nice," writes Ann Althouse, directing us to a contest for bloggers to design a new logo for Blogads. Henry Copeland explains:

Yesterday on the phone Doc Searls expostulated, unsolicited, that the current Blogads logo is "butt ugly." He's not the first to complain.

Current Blogads logo is the equivalent of a master plan sketched on a cocktail napkin.

The logo was actually a mistake. Three and a half years ago, unhappy with the creepy corporate logos a professional designer kept proposing, I scribbled in my notebook an inkling of what our logo might look like. As a placeholder, we scanned that scrawny image and stuck it on our prototypes . . . where it has lived ever since.

We'll pay $1000 to the creator of our new logo and $300 to the blogger whose post refers or inspires her/him.

Fame and fortune beckoned.  Staring at the existing logo, we envisioned what Henry Copeland had had in mind when he put pen to paper three and a half years ago.  Then we headed out into cyberspace for Linotype.com -- "The Source of the Originals" -- and found the perfect typeface, Linotype Bioplasm™ by Mauro Carichini, 2002:

The round, often open forms of Bioplasm are dynamic, modern and objective. This typeface is an excellent choice for headlines . . .

Linotype has an instantly gratifying feature where you can create a sample of a sentence or phrase in any of their typefaces. It was love at first sight, so we jumped in -- with our usual abandon -- opened an account and ordered and downloaded Linotype Bioplasm™ right then and there. Installation was a breeze. Then we opened it in Photoshop, added a couple of blending options to bump it up, turned it around and there was our logo.  Fun stuff.  Even if we don't win, we've discovered a shiny new toy.