* I apologize for the lateness of this post, but we were upgrading servers due to the high traffic on the website. The site should now be functioning quickly and efficiently! Thanks for crashing our website, you wonderful, busy community! <3 *
Happy happy birthday to our beautiful and beloved beast, the International Geek Girl Pen Pals Club. This magical community has grown, shifted, and become something quite different than what it started out to be. I’d love to take you on a journey through the trials and tribulations of our growth and choices, more specifically with our design and website! We’re happy to answer any questions you have about our design or transitions, so post a comment and ask away!
Logo Evolution
We started off the IGGPPC with a logo that said “geek” and “mail,” resembling a stamp you might see on an envelope. Pink and blue were chosen, in a femme tribute to the red and blue you often see on airmail envelopes. As time went on, we decided the pink was too girly, and went for a more subtle, feminine, yet inclusive color, purple. Additionally, we foresaw copyright issues with Darth Vadar, and we switched to the more generic geek symbol, the D20. A lot of people have asked us, exactly what is a D20? A D20 is a 20 sided diced, used in tabletop gaming, and commonly, Dungeons and Dragons. Not only that, but it’s a time for geeks to gather around the table and connect in a weird way, much like our club. There’s always an unusual activity or 2 to do online, and amongst your fellow International Iggles here on the site, so in our logo we too pay tribute to a time for geeks to get together and have fun.
Website Evolution
The days of Ning
Technically, our first website was a simple form on formsite.com, with a logo and a form, asking geeks for their top 5 geek loves. This was back in the days before we had more than 2 staff members, or a Twitter, or a Facebook, or anything fancy like that. (And you can see the original letter we wrote out to the community regarding the explosive growth here!) So once we realized that the IGGPPC was in fact a giant massive horde of amazing people, the community demanded, well, a community! Thus we sought out a social network type of site. We started out on Ning, a site notorious for being a great place for communities to gather. Ultimately, the pricetag on Ning, poorly designed forums, and limited functionality and user friendliness sent us packing, and we sought to improve somehow…
Oh joy, oh happiness! It’s WordPress!
In early 2014, We decided to make the best choice we could have made, and build a WordPress site for our beloved friends. This would include a much better blog, an easier to use site dashboard for easy upkeep, better forums, and of course, our beloved achievements. Our WordPress has since seen a number of fabulous upgrades in both design, layout, and functionality, and ultimately we ended up with what you see before you, our current website.
Staff Evolution
What was 2, doubled into 4. Pictured are the original 4 staff members, Emma, Farquharson, Stewie & Sparkles. This amazing art was done by the glorious Emma! Emma stepped down from staff to focus on her art, but we soon transitioned into 9…
Pictured are the 9 of us, Stewie, Farquharson, Sparkles, Toasty, Val, Sumsy, Kim, Kara & Jo, spend tireless hours running in the giant iggle hamster wheel. Upkeeping this community takes a lot of time and work!
Special Events
IGGPPCamp 2014
The design from IGGPPCamp was a fun experiment and throwback to the days of Girl Scout camp. We had such fun making s’mores and singing songs with our fellow troops!
Halloween Party 2014
And of course, the queen of creepy, Farquharson, had her fun with our lovely Halloween Party! Such spoopy <3
Pen Pal Rounds
Each time we run a round of pen pal pairings, we pick a unique and fun theme to go along with it. Here’s a brief history of the past 21 rounds of themes, which have been running about once a month since March 19, 2013. Farquharson and I just love doing the design for these!
Thanks for joining me on this journey through the designs of the IGGPPC. Our logo, website look, and themes might change and evolve, but our spirit remains the same. We are always trying to improve everything about ourselves, including our brand and our look, so any and all feedback is appreciated. We do it all for you guys! Thank you for everything you’ve done for us over the past 2 years, which has always lit the fire in our heart and makes us try as hard as we can to make this community and website a wonderful, fun, positive and very entertaining place for iggles across the globe.
<3 <3 <3
So many awesome memories and its only been 2 years! I can’t wait to see what the future holds!
What a cool post! I’ve only been a member for a few months, and loved seeing the designs for all the past rounds. Here’s to many more! 😀
I love the new logo so much !
And it’s SSOOOO strange to see all the round themes here, it seems like it was yesterday… 🙂
[…] The International Geek Girl Pen Pal Club just celebrated their 2 year anniversary(!!!) and they have a great post about the evolution of their logo design. […]