Collective Detective Blog Archives

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.

The Making of Collectivus

My development experience has been that collaboration, iteration, and communication lead to better products. To that, we’re going to chronicle a lot of the happenings and progress of Collectivus, with some flashbacks thrown in for color.

Quick back story: the Collectivus name was first used as a meta-blog talking about many “hive mind” related topics. I ran from 2003 to early 2005 (I think). It was also an effort to diversify the interests of the site beyond the online mysteries and applying collective brainpower to other subjects.

…And We’re Back

So Collective Detective has been on a bit of a hiatus for awhile while we’ve been focused on past, current, future and non-CD specific projects. It’s funny how that happens. Our upcoming project Collectivus started like a movie that’s been in development hell for years. It starts out as a “what if,” on a drive somewhere or over a lunch in a deli with bad service — some notes are made. The idea sits in a notebook for awhile while and you go off to work on another project. You pick at it now and then. Make changes; make rewrites. The time wasn’t right, right people weren’t available, no financing, your agent fled to Tijuana with your life savings. The usual. The idea was good and strong, it just needed to wait for the pixels to align.

So now is the beginning of that time. We’re kinda-sorta, halfway in the middle of starting to tell you about our next ambitious project. We’re going to chronicle what we can here, use our social networks to help us find the right talent and resources to help us along and we’ll all go on a journey together.

So to our old friends: It’s nice to talk to you all again. To those of you wandering over for the first time: Welcome to Collective Detective. To the search engine bots: Happy Indexing!

More soon!