Going Solo

Enter the twisty roads of branding. Going Solo Lausanne ’08 was branded simply “Going Solo” (and a bit in a rush!) — so with the preparation of Going Solo Leeds ’08, I’ve been wondering how to deal with the website (I’m figuring it out, thankfully, as you can see if you start clicking around) and also, what to do about the logo.

Those of you who were already around at the time will remember that the badges and logo for Going Solo were whipped up in a bit of an emergency by the lovely and talented Stephanie Troeth, who in addition to being a precious advisor to Going Solo, also took part in the panel Solo in a Networked World in Lausanne.

I decided to keep the logo for the Leeds event (Steph tells me she wasn’t expecting it to stick around so long!) with a slight modification to indicate that it is not the Lausanne event anymore. Corinne Stoppelli (Exoconcept) came up with the Leeds stamp you can see below:

The logo also exists as a square, and on a white background. Sébastien Baudet kindly took over the rather ungratifying work of exporting the logo (and badges!) from Photoshop over and over again in various shapes and sizes. The “Promote Going Solo” page (lovingly put together by Virginie) will give you access to all the different versions, with handy copy-paste code so you can easily use this material on your site.

Oh yes, there’s a hint here. Now that you have shiny visual material close at hand, we’re expecting to see many a blog post!

Going Solo doesn’t have any branding yet. This is a standard WordPress.com design, which is preventing this site from being all naked until the branding is ready (normally, I’m told, this should be the case in roughly two weeks).

Now, in the meantime, I would like to be able to provide the nice people helping promote Going Solo with a pretty banner or badge to use on their blogs as fast as possible. So, here’s the dilemma: do I get something “quick and dirty” done (there is also some printed material I want to order… yesterday — LIFT will be here soon, you see), and have the “visual identity” of Going Solo change at some point, or wait?

What do you think?

PS: any standard dimensions out there for sidebar banners/badges?