I became something of a fan of Andrew “Jungle Bird” Dudley when he crashed the U.S. Open golf tournament, apologized for crashing the party, and made the Jay Leno show. With the help of 99Designs, a logo design contest was held to create a new logo to advance his cause of stopping deforestation. After 13 designers submitted 67 designs, Jungle Bird has selected a new logo that incorporates a cartoon rendering of himself wearing his quirky British flag hat and uttering his signature line, a jungle bird with a winked eye and raised thumb, and his website URL.

Until I was contacted by Lauren Gard after my first blog post about Jungle Bird, I wasn’t aware of 99designs and its logo design contests. After keeping tabs on the Jungle Bird contest and browsing through the logo store (ready made logos available for exclusive or non-exclusive licensing at reasonable rates), I’ll be setting up a banner logo contest for this website within the next three months.

Once Upon An Albatross… has had many different logos that I slapped together since it started off as a Wildcat! BBS in 1995 and went through many different website iterations over the last 17 years. (I sometimes kick myself for sticking with the BBS name and not naming the website something more reasonable.) This year I jettisoned the banner logo for plain text and put off on doing the replacement banner logo. With a logo design contest at 99designs, this might be easy to do and fun at the same time.

What would a new banner logo look like? I’m not sure. This is something that requires careful thought. If you don’t know what you want, the designers won’t be able to help.  A cartoon albatross maybe (but not the albatross from Walt Disney’s “The Rescuers”), little motifs from literary, BBS and Silicon Valley inspirations, and a design that can work well on different media (i.e., t-shirts and coffee mugs). It’ll be interesting to see what the designers come up with.

Unlike Jungle Bird, I won’t be able to add alcohol to create an instant brand.