Step 1: Finding a name.

This part didn’t involve me. My co-worker Levana had already canvassed the multitudinous youth groups that we work with at various trainings, gatherings, and presentations. The name RYSE, possibly but not necessarily an acronym for RAN Youth Sustaining the Earth, rose to the top (no pun intended). Kids liked it, despite—or perhaps due to—its deliberate misspelling.

Step 2: Crafting a brand.

The next step was to gather adjectives that would describe the kind of identity that we wished to create for RYSE. Since it’s a youth network (as in high school age), a lot of the RAN staff excused themselves from this step, leaving the younger members to generate the list. The list of adjectives for the logo ended up being a good mix of useful (doodleable, authentic, upward movement) and generic (hip, cool, smooth).

Step 3: Casting a wide net.

The design process now on my plate, it seemed right to start with a brainstorm. Based on the list of adjectives I received, I put together these twelve designs. Having just read “The Wisdom of Crowds” on my holiday train ride, I was very wary of the process turning into a consensus-based design by committee, turning the logo to poop.

Step 4: Raising the bar.

Instead of circling up and talking through our opinions, the team was asked to vote on their three favorites without mutual consultation. The idea was that the least inspired logos would quietly drop out of the race. That’s indeed what happened, and we ended up with these. There were still too many to send to our youth groups, so next was a quick “embarrassment vote” to remove the ones we didn’t even want the youth to consider.

Step 5: Getting feedback.

Now we were down to five designs, which we felt were good enough to send back to our youth allies for consideration. We asked for both word associations (so we could match them to our list) and Favorite/Least Favorite votes from them. Though the voting for Favorite showed a dead tie across all the logos, the word associations we got back were priceless. “Skyward” and “empowering” were used to describe one, while another just received “weak”. The silver bullet was the feedback that one of our activists would, “totally wear a t-shirt with that one on it.”

Step 6: Closing in.

This next step involved tweaking the design chosen from the feedback through multiple variations to see if there were other treatments that we preferred. Some people had asked beforehand if we could see this one like this or that one like that, but I kept punting the tweaking until after we had gotten a little closer to a decision—no sense in making multiple versions of a bad logo, especially when we’re crunched for time.

Step 7: The devil’s in the details.

Everyone was pretty sure that we had found our logo at this point and all that remained was the tweaking, fitting, squishing, and squeezing of what I considering a rough “scribble”, albeit digital, into the “final” version. Sending these details around for a final vote, most of the comments were in the family of, “they all look great” or “those are very small differences, any are fine”. Only a few people actually kept voting this far into the process.

Step 8: The new RYSE logo.

I took the final logo and did all the technical things in Illustrator to make it feel more “final”, like stroking borders, expanding appearances, and simplifying paths. The vectors went from about 1300 points of complex paths to about 300 points of much simpler paths—stripped for export if you will. Then I had a little fun exploring what it might look like in a two-color piece and made the birth announcement to the team. We had a new logo.

The whole process took just about two weeks, not including the casual conversations and market research that led to the name in the first place. I’m quite pleased with the logo, especially that we managed to include so many voices—like the youth we’ve been working with (it’s their logo, after all)—while keeping the process from slipping into groupthink and lowest-common-denominatorism. Bravo, my inner Creative Director.

The cover of the latest Fortune blasts the bold headline: “Chaos@Google!” But before you sell your favorite stock, read the subtitle: “The inside story of disorder, disarray, and uncertainty at Google. And why it’s all part of the plan.” Indeed, the article implies that the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA is closer to a raucous playground than the austere sanctuary one might expect as the home of arguably the internet’s biggest success story. That’s how they want it. VP for Business Operations Shona Brown even wrote a book on the subject, “Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos“.

But it’s not just talk. Consider what Larry Page’s response to an employee that cost the company millions of dollars:

I’m so glad you made this mistake. Because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much, not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don’t have any of these mistakes, we’re just not taking enough risk.

That’s crazy talk! Millions of dollars and he’s practically happy about it. To the asylum with him!

But he’s not the only one milking madness. Business Week this week (I really don’t normally read so many mainstream, Wall Street-y type magazines, but my officemate had some around) has a whole section called “Inside Innovation“, which seems to be basically a list of crazy ways for suits to get creative—and they’re good! Some of them:

1. Pairing sensible engineers with wacky artists to co-generate ideas.
2. Important rules for brainstorming from Bob Sutton, who has previously suggested ignoring your boss to promote innovation.
3. Apple Designer Jonathan Ive suggests that an innovative idea will likely change the company that produces it.
4. Or just steal good ideas from places like TED, which I’m shocked I haven’t linked to previously.

I feel kind of dirty linking to Fortune and Business Week as proof that chaos, anarchy, and noise have a vital place in the world today. Could it be that Corporate America is making the slow transition from Orange to Green?