Logo Design Process: D-Groups

Pastor requested a logo for our version of d-groups last week. A google search turned up several goodies. The one I guess is one of the original d-group logos was this one:

which I thought was kinda interesting and modern-ish. I love their color combination - especially that rich gray, though I would probably need to use the blue and light gray we have in our logo instead [for consistency sake]. Wasn't sure about the sharp speech bubble idea or the text layout in the bubble there...

I considered how the speech bubble one might could be altered to better serve our purposes. Then I ran across Northstar Church in Knoxville. Their discipleship pathway had symbols that represented each thing. Here's the d-group one I stalled on:

Northstar Church Knoxville's d-group icon

Ok - so, that's really cool. Love the shadow too, but it wasn't active enough for me. Later that afternoon, while I was listening to my Amazon music, I saw the "share" icon and a light went on in my noggin'.

Amazon's share icon

Yep - that's what I wanted. Something active that would speak both to the older and the younger crowd. Most of the younger group would subconsciously know that the sideways connected dots was the "share" symbol, and that's what we'd be doing in d-groups, sharing our lives, discipling others so that they in turn disciple others. And for the older crowd that read it as a greater than symbol... well, that would work thematically too.

Then I was off to the races. Combined all of the ideas I liked and realized after many, many, many versions of the bubble version that it might work better without it... too many ideas going on at once.

Some of the rough bubble versions... Our logo is round, so I even tried rounded corners, but I kept thinking it was too complicated.

Here is the last iteration of the bubble option... discarded in favor of a non-bubble version.

So, here are the finals...

Mark version - made the "D" a little heavier than in the full logo version.