The idea for the company name Wanderkind came to me as my personal interest in the German language converged in space and time with my desire to “work from anywhere.”

A short time later, I played with designing a logo for Wanderkind. What follows is a visual and textual account of the Wanderkind name, and my attempt at designing some logos to present it. Hope you enjoy!

Whence Wanderkind?

The Wanderkind name has largely been used as a placeholder for my e-mail address. I.e.: you won’t see any giant spinning, lighted Wanderkind logos atop Seattle skyscrapers as you cruise I-5 at dusk. But I like the name, I still use it today, and it will <evil_laugh>someday dominate the world</evil_laugh>

The name comes from a bit of word-play: a wunderkind* is a type of genius or prodigy. But I wanted to work from anywhere–hence the wander. Also, I’ve got an odd attention span, so wander applies to that as well. Wunderkind, well, OK, that’s a bit egotistic. Kind? German for child. Applicable.

A CAT5 Cable

Somewhere between 1999 and 2003, I created a business card with the following:

Globetrotter Consulting

Give me a CAT5 cable…and a beach

But as early as 1999, I was plugging my cell-phone up to my computer to get ridiculously slow internet access at the my local coffee house. Maybe it was 2001. At any rate, the CAT5 cable was completely unnecessary.

I was The Early Adopter. When Starbucks offered wifi/wlan access I signed up (with MobileStar, remember them?) without a moment of thought.

The promise of work-freedom: freedom from traffic jams, freedom from “have to be in the office at 8AM”, freedom from weekly status meetings loomed large in my mind. I wanted to be an IT Nomad. I wanted to earn a living and not have to stand and wait in all the same lines as the 9 to 5 crowd.

“W” is For…

So the logo design was fun. I think messing around with these things i quite a lot of fun. I feel for the graphic designers that have to do this kind of thing under job- and deadline pressures.

So I’ve got my laptop and wireless connection, and can work from anywhere. An open laptop looks like a V. A W looks like two Vs. Hmmm…

With my trusty installation of Visio, I whipped up a side view of my Dell Inspiron some-number. Remember the ones you could order in blue? I was so proud to not have gray…

Some quick one-point perspective extrusion trials looked promising:

A little more detail…

Experimentation with different angles and extrusions:

The temptation to screw around is irresistable:

Finally, two Ws:

And some finished logos:

That one is a bit heavy. This one is lighter and more appealing:

It also suggests the flowchartic nature of the Visio consulting I do to pay the bills.

While I was pleased with how well Visio did with on the graphic-arts end of things, and I found the process and evolution fascinating and fun, I think the logo is still missing something, so I’ve never put it to use.

Maybe you have some constructive criticism or comments for me?