In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the initial logo options made available to us and the direction we had decided to explore.

Here's what the designers came back with for round 2:

We couldn't find anything we liked in these logos--the colours were flat, the symbols were tacky and tired, the typefaces were boring. There was more wrong with every one of these logos than there was right with any of them. We still couldn't see a logo that had character, life and a strong identity.

The worst part was the designer's inability to think beyond the logo itself. Cleartrip wasn't looking for just a logo design, we were looking to create an identity for our brand. Creating a brand takes more than just designing a logo; a well-designed brand has a holistic underlying design system where symbols, colours and typefaces come together to consistently represent the brand and its identity.

When designing a logo, the brand designer needs to think about the world in which that logo will live and breathe. They need to visualise and consider the varied uses of the brand--web sites, business cards, brochures, t-shirts and other paraphernalia. They also need to think about how a brand can be extended into various other areas as it evolves--brand extensions and sub-brands.

We weren't seeing any of this thinking in the logos we were reviewing and it was terrifying; it seemed like the designers just didn't get what we were talking about and we'd end up having to settle for something that no one really loved.

So, we did what we always do at Cleartrip--we started working on it ourselves. Over two or three days, we created dozens of alternative logos. We worked within the constraints that designers since the time of Paul Rand have worked with--black and white renditions only; if a logo doesn't work in black and white, it will never work in colour. Here's some of them:

Even though we thought these were hugely better than the ones we got from the outside designers, nothing was really giving us that eureka feeling. We weren't quite there yet, but we were getting closer--you can already see that the typographical part of the logos above is quite close to our current logo.

Next up, we'll take a look at the final Cleartrip brand and how it delivered everything we were looking for.

• 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