trademark

• Applying for Trademark Protection

  23 Jan 2009 by Dean / 3 Comments

  Our mascot, the aardvark, is a popular animal. Recently, we discovered another software project using an aardvark mascot. That got Gordon and me thinking about applying for trademark protection. After all, we registered the domain name and signed up for Twitter and GetSatisfaction accounts. It makes sense to register our name and logo, too.

  While trademark registration is more expensive than domain name registration, it’s still very reasonable for small businesses. Trademark registration costs vary depending on whether you do it yourself or have a lawyer file it for you. We opted to have a law firm file for us. It saved us some time and paperwork.

  We submitted our application two weeks ago, but we didn’t use our original logo. Instead, we used our new and improved version.

  Small logo changes, big results

  As part of our UI redesign, Amy suggested that we make a few changes to our logo. Now we really like our logo, but we thought we’d entertain a few ideas. The new look of our application keeps many of the same colors, but is much brighter and bolder. Amy felt that we needed a friendlier, chunkier font for the logo, rather than the refined Avant Garde. Here’s the original logo:
  
  We’d also noticed that people tended to misspell Infovark in all sorts of interesting ways. People often wrote our company name like “Info Vark” or “InfoVark” instead of as Infovark. I thought the two-tone color scheme used by the text might be at fault, so we decided to make the letters all one color.

  Our original logo also implied a lowercase “i” for the company name, with the dot of the “i” being the Infovark’s head. We liked the friendly, unpretentious feel of the lowercase “i”, but after a few months of fighting automated spell check in email and documentation, we decided to go for the path of least resistance. (We are building an easy-to-use productivity tool, after all. having to mess around with funky capitalization ran counter to our mission.) That meant that we wanted the “I” in Infovark to appear in upper case. The easy fix was to make the critter all one color and the text a different color.

  So after all these tweaks, our new and improved logo looks like this:
  

  I’m really pleased with this version. It’s amazing what a dramatic improvement those little changes make.

  Oh, and for my fellow type nerds, the new font is Whitney from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

  And now a word from our lawyers

  We’re in the process of registering a trademark on the new logo as well as on the Infovark name. That means that in 4-5 months, assuming we pass examination, we’ll be able to use the “circle R” ® symbol. For now, we can use the trademark symbol, ™.

  It’s tedious and pedantic to use these symbols everywhere, so you won’t often see them on the site. But for the record: Infovark™.

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