Collective Detective Blog Archives

Collectivus.com vs. Collectiv.us

So in this era of new domain extensions and mobile Internet surfing, a few of the things one looks at when launching a web property is the the domain and the URL people will see and use.

In “web 1.0,” it used to be that it was important to prefix the website with “www.” because otherwise people would be confused. (Mind you I’m articulating this from a layman’s point-of-view, the system admin-side of me knows exactly the reasons for doing these things.)

“Web 2.0,” brought with it a trend of dropping vowels out of names (flickr) and leveraging creative uses of TLDs to overcome the lack of decent, easy-to-remember dot com names.

I’d been toying with formally using “http://collectiv.us” for the official domain name. It was shorter and “in.” That was essentially the reasoning. With yesterday’s relaunch of Delicious (formally del.icio.us), the Yahoo-owned bookmarking service, I’ve realized that their logic is sound and mine was bad. When possible: Stick to the basics when it comes to your domain names!

From the Delicious Blog:

So why did we switch to delicious.com? We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com”, and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends.

Another good reason to keep it simple is that most browsers will attempt to tack on a “http://” and “.com” when you just type a word into the location bar like “delicious” or I dunno… maybe “collectivus” and hit enter. It’s the browser’s helpful way of saying: “Is this what you meant?” Making it easy for visitors to find your site is pretty important stuff. Why complicate it even a little if you don’t have to?

So when we go live, the official URL for Collectivus will be http://collectivus.com. We’re pretty sure it’s safe to leave the “www.” off these days; we’ll make sure all of the other variations still work though.

The Collectivus Logo

I created the original Collectivus logo in 2003. The cube in the logo was designed around the concept that individual connections could combine to make something bigger and greater.

There were two designs used on the site: one of just the block of cubes with a small cube off to the left-side, the other a circle of cubes surrounding the larger block. The latter was also used in a project called “Collective Effect,” which applied the power of collaboration to raise money and awareness for charity and a satellite effort of CollectiveDetective.org

The font for the Collectivus logo is “Murray Hill Bold BT.” I hacked together some of the letter alignment; the “v” especially was raised much more than the other letters. I’m not sure what I was thinking regarding the colors.

I knew I still wanted to use all these elements for our new web application. With a few more years of experience screwing around with graphics under my belt, I took a crack at revising the logo for 2008. Being a lean start-up, there’s still a lot of DIY; I don’t claim to be any great designer. There were a few issues I wanted to address:

• Alignment of the letters
• Moving the single cube to also represent the “dot” in Collectiv.us
• In the old version, the individual cube didn’t have anywhere to “fit in.” So I made a slot in the block of cubes.

The style guide is still not locked for Collectivus, so for now I’ve just applied the same color palette used here on Collective Detective.

Here’s the updated logo:

So that’s the short story of the Collectivus logo. I’m happy to hear your feedback or suggestions.