Part 2 of this story revealed how our frustration with external designers prodded us into trying to create Cleartrip's brand identity ourselves--the outsourcing effort just wasn't working. Settling for mediocrity has never been part of the way we do anything at Cleartrip and we certainly weren't going to settle when it came to our brand.

As we continued to churn out more design options, one particular exploration began to look like it had real promise. We called it "speech bubbles."

It wasn't perfect, but there was something about it that felt right. The typeface was modern without being juvenile and felt comforting. The "speech bubble" to the left of the brand name gave us a component in the logo that could be used independently of the brand name. It looked open, friendly and happy. We liked the direction and went full steam ahead with turning what we had into something we could fall in love with and put in front of the rest of our team.

We had three versions of the logo, the two you can see above and a third with the, now familiar, "Cleartrip tick" in it. We squinted long and hard at the three versions and decided that the smiley face was too mundane and unconnected to our products and services. The arrow was a little better, easier to associate with travel, but also overused.

The tick was beginning to look better and better. As a symbol, the tick felt reassuring; it communicated that Cleartrip was looking after you and taking care of all the little details on your behalf. Someone even pointed out that it kind of looked like an airplane. The more we squinted at the three choices, the better the tick looked and we went with it. We started refining the logo--colours, typography and shape.

The first thing to go was the little speech bubble arrow at the bottom--we thought it was unrelated to our brand and more suited to a community-type startup. Then came the colours. We experimented with quite a few combinations ranging from one colour to three colour, eventually opting to have a two colour rendition with a classic deep blue for the logotype and a vivid burnt orange for the mark.

Having finalised the visual appearance of the Cleartrip brand, we began working on all the other things that go into designing a brand--logo usage guidelines, an extended palette of colours, brand architecture and sample applications of the brand. We even designed an Airbus A320 jet with the Cleartrip brand emblazoned on it (we wanted to see how far we could "scale" the brand ;).

We wrapped all of the work we had done into a presentation and proudly showed it of to our ten person team. It was love at first sight, everyone loved it as much as we did.

We learned something in the process as well--that it's next to impossible to compete with passion. When passion and conviction come together, they're impossible to beat. We were passionate about what we wanted the Cleartrip brand to be and we were convinced that there was something better than the external designers were giving us. That passion and conviction drove us to create something we couldn't have believed ourselves capable of, to design something we could fall in love with.

And that is the story of this brand. One of these days, we'll try and share the story of our home page.

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