Following on from the intro, this post explores our early decisions and design options.

After we raised our first round of funding, we decided we needed a new logo as we weren't terribly happy with the old one. We decided to outsource the design of our brand and came up with a brief to give the design agencies we contacted. The purpose of the brief was simple--to give the agency an introduction of who Cleartrip was as a company and what we wanted our brand to be. In a nutshell, we told agencies we wanted the Cleartrip brand to communicate the following characteristics:

• Simple and easy
• Honest and transparent
• Reliable
• Cheeky, with a sense of humour

We had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted the Cleartrip brand to be and thought we had communicated it fairly well to the agencies. We received seven different logos for consideration from the various agencies we contacted, here they are:

After reviewing the submissions, we were a little shellshocked--was this the best that designers today could come up with? We knew we didn't have a massive budget for the exercise, but the quality of these submissions was far below what we had been expecting--most of the logos were downright unusable; especially the ones in the middle that would take up a huge amount of vertical space on computer screens.

The airplane logo at the bottom-right side of the image was the best of the lot. We decided to continue exploring that particular direction, even though we knew we didn't love it--we picked it simply because it was the best of the worst.

Next up, we'll take a look at how that exploration turned out.

• Intro: The original Cleartrip brand
• Part 1: The brand options
• Part 2: These suck, let's do it ourselves
• Part 3: Love the new Cleartrip brand