Goplan had a facelift a few weeks ago with the launch of v2 and we thought it might be interesting to tell you guys about the creative process behind the new logo.

The first thing we had to do was come up with the new logo idea, so I sent an email to everyone at WBS asking them to write down at least five objects/images they associate with Goplan. The results were pretty interesting.

We had a good number of answers but some stood out. The most chosen were checklist, post-it notes, blueprint, blackboard and briefcase. This ended up working great - we got a bunch of great ideas of where to go with the new identity.

When that was done I needed to get all the ideas on paper to start thinking what might work best. After sketching a few of the ideas, a really good one came to my mind. The concept was: two different images, one for each part of the name: Go+Plan. This way people could read the logo and see the name without the text. It was simple, efficient and I really believed it might work.

The next step was picking the best concepts for each of the words. For “Go” it was easy, a cool checkmark would do just fine. For “Plan” i looked at the pool of ideas from the survey and decided that the blueprint would probably work best.

I grabbed my stuff and rushed to the office to share the concept with everyone. They liked as much as I did which was great! The hard part was over and now I had something concrete to work on.

I started drawing a few blueprints but got to a point where a bit of inspiration would do wonders, so I searched for “blueprint” on Compfight ^[1] and got a few nice results. When I thought I had a good starting point i opened up Illustrator and began to work on the final logo.

The first thing i started working on was the blueprint. I did a simple 2d blueprint with some diagrams, then i used the 3d>rotate tool to give it some depth.

After some tweaks on that i started working on the check-mark and I thought the best was giving it a smooth 3d effect. Just like the blueprint, i made a 2d version first, but now i used the 3d>extrude&bevel tool to create the 3d look.

I combined the two elements and voilá:

Then it was time to pick a good font to match the blueprint and check-mark icon. I ended choosing ITC Officina Sans from ITC. I felt the 3D look from the check-mark was fine so i did the same thing to the font.

Combining all the elements this was the final result:

So now after finishing the logo, i moved on to create the icons and some extras. To create the icons i saved the blueprint+checkmark in a few different sizes and opened them in Photoshop to tweak the smaller ones.

Notice that the smaller icons are different because in smaller sizes the logo was too complex so i change it to a simpler version and I think it worked nice.

Then i made some different versions of the logo as you can see below.

And that was that, hope you find this post useful and don’t forget to give us your feedback, we really value it.

^[1]: Compfight is a great tool to look for stuff on Flickr. I highly recommend it if you’re a creative and need a little extra inspiration (and who doesn’t?).

As some of you might have noticed, we’ve been introducing small updates and changes to Goplan 2 since we launched, mostly based on your (both awesome and very welcome) feedback. Now that things are running smoothly, we’re considering an update schedule moving forward. From now on, we’ll be doing bi-monthly updates to Goplan with new features (or feature updates) as well as the ongoing bug-fixes (should there be any).

Coming June 29: The first of these functionality updates is coming on Monday, the 29th of June, where among other things (for which we don’t want to ruin the surprise already) we’ll be updating our milestone functionality quite a bit, making it easier for project managers to assign tasks to given milestones and manage them effectively. The second of these updates will be coming 2 weeks later, and so on.

We’ll be using this blog more often to tell you about both small and large updates to Goplan 2, as well as share some of the tips and tricks that users much like you have been sending in. Do send us email if you have any feedback, we are extremely happy about everything we’ve been hearing. We hope you’re happy about the product as much as we are. Coming next week: hints on future functionality.

Although Goplan 2 took quite a bit to be released, we believe in the “release early, release often” mantra, of letting people work with the application and react to real feedback from real users. This is exactly what we did with tasks. We got quite a lot of feedback from you guys on the new tasks screen since we released GP2 on friday, and yesterday most of the things you asked for in your feedback went live.

You were missing the drag-and-drop functionality for prioritization, and the consistence of the tools (those that show up when you drag your mouse over tasks on the task list) being on the right-hand side of the screen. Yesterday we fixed both those things, and the changes are already live on the production servers as I write this post. There’s still quite a bit of changes coming to the task functionality (we’re simplifying the way you can add due dates, in particular) which will be deployed soon.

We wouldn’t be able to work this fast and iterate so quickly if it wasn’t for your feedback - you guys have been awesome. We realize not everything is perfect about the product right now, but we are trying to improve every day. Keep sending in your suggestions. Thanks!

If there’s one thing about the current Goplan that remains similar to the previous version is our payment system, which relies on Paypal. Since we consider Paypal to be - in this case - a bit of a hassle, it makes sense to explain why we have to stick with it for the time being.

As you may know, being a european startup makes it so we can’t use a payment gateway like Authorize.net - like we’ve done in the past for other products whose legal representation is in the US. Truth is payment gateways in europe are subpar, and we’re looking for a solution to this problem. Until we finally find a solution, we have to apologize for having you use Paypal - which means you need an account on their system to have your company on ours. We know that sucks and we hope the product compensates for that bit of a hassle. We’re on this, and hope to have a solution soon.