Create the next Logo Design for Water Horse Media, LLC

Water Horse Media, LLC

Water Horse Media is a small start-up web design and multimedia enterprise in Northern Virginia.

The Water Horse, also known as a Kelpie, is a mythical creature from Celtic legend. (To read more about what a Water Hores/Kelpie is, refer to "Kelpie" on Wikipedia.) However, just to clarify, we are looking for "magnificent pony," not "mythical beast." Think Beucephalus, not Nessie. We want to stay away from any representations of a Plesiosaur, and instead convey an imposing, powerful image incorporating a more traditional horse form (just the head is fine, although a rearing pony would work too), perhaps with a mane of stylized water droplets. Or not?

We don't want to dictate too much detail here lest we constrain the designers' creativity, but we would like this to look slick and modern, perhaps with use of negative space, with strong, clean, edgy typography, emphasizing the words Water Horse with less emphasis on the word Media. If "LLC" is included in the logo, it should be very small and of much less weight than Water Horse.

We are also open to more classic Emblem or Character treatments if we find that a modern treatment is too cold or off-putting in actual execution. We'll know better which direction to go once we have some designs to respond to.

Our demographic is high-end, high-profile clients in the Capitol area who are used to seeing very competitive work, so this needs to look cutting-edge and high quality.

I should add that although the primary use of this logo will be on the web, we'll probably need to eventually use the logo in hi-res (or a scalable vector), so bear that in mind when creating the files.

UPDATE: I've browsed some current logo contests and collected some shots of logos to which the team responded positively in regards to style. I've posted two sheets of examples that got high marks (some were on gray backgrounds so we created two files so things didn't look so clunky, but we would have put all samples on one background if it hadn't been so distracting - there is no specific preference between the two sheets of examples). Obviously we *do not* want to copy any of these designs, but you will see a lot of similarities in the designs. Most use sans serif typefaces, in clean, modern "techno" fonts, with lighting effects and sometimes reflections. Although most are horizontal in orientation, we don't have a strong preference there, only we don't want something that feels oddly long, so compact is better. There are some gel effects, and some clever use of negative space to create the symbols or non-text portions of the logo. There's a clear separation between the words, usually not done with space, but by color. We hope this helps provide guidance.