I've been hard at work founding a company and building its product, but the time has come to give it an identity.  Not a full-tilt branding exercise, but a decent logo to put on business cards and a web site.  To that end, I recently held a contest at 99designs.com, and the response was overwhelming.  401 submissions in a week.  It was extremely difficult to cut that number down to 16, which is where I'm at today, and where I need your help to get that number down to 1.

99designs supports polls of up to 8 submissions, so I've put together 2 of them at the links below.  I'd like to ask you to take no more than 5 minutes of your time to rate the submissions in both polls.  Your help would be immensely beneficial to me in narrowing down the selection - I'd appreciate it tremendously.

I'm not going to go into what the product is on "national radio" because it's not quite ready to launch, but I'll describe the mission I gave the designers and ask you to please balance what you "like" vs. "don't like" with how well you think the design fits the mission.

So here are the links:

And here was the mission:

"Leaning Towards" re: Branding target:

• Mature, not young
• Modern, not classic
• Serious, not playful
• Simple, not complex

"Neutral Towards" re: Branding target:

• Masculine / Feminine
• Luxury / Economical
• Loud / Quiet
• Subtle / Obvious

Other:

• The branding must easily be conveyed in an application icon (like you would have on an Application menu or iPhone home screen)

Audience:

 

PC / Windows users.  It is more important that our brand identify with the Corporate IT audience, however there may be a consumer pursuit at some point

• Professional / Corporate
  • CIO
  • IT Professional (System Administrator)
  • Software / Licensing / Compliance managers