Sunday Afternoon Industry Thoughts and Updates

Wishing those of you who celebrate a happy Easter today. You should really stay away from the auction venues today while you celebrate the holiday šŸ™‚

I wanted to share some domain industry updates, thoughts, and news. If you have anything to add or want to share your own news, you are welcome to do so in the comment section.

  • Thank you to Theo Develegas for creating a great new logo and color scheme for Embrace.com, a marketplace I launched to help sell some of my company’s domain names. It’s a fairly simple concept but I love the icon and it really expresses the meaning of “embrace” in a subtle manner. I also like the color change, which I wasn’t expecting. Theo’s my main guy when I (infrequently) have design projects.
  • Verisign recently announced the release of the IDN .Ć£ā€šĀ³Ć£Ę’Ā , the Japanese version of .com, and it Ā is currently in a Priority Access period allowing anyone with an existing .com or .net to buy a matching one. Name.com added a search feature that will identify the .com and .net names that you have in your account and list their .Ć£ā€šĀ³Ć£Ę’Ā  counterparts. Read more about this in their blog post announcing this new feature.
  • There’s a good read from someone named Ā Dominic on NamePros. In the thread, he discusses his first year in the domain investment space and shares some thoughts on where he made some mistakes and what he did right. It’s nice to see someone sharing like this because there are plenty of people in the same boat. It’s also a good reminder for everyone to take stock in their businesses each year.
  • A reader named Candace suggested that Uniregistry create a video tutorial to walk customers through the Uniregistry Market, and I think that is a great idea. I have been trying out the new Market to see what’s new and what’s changed, and a tutorial would go a long way in helping me make the most of it.
  • .Club CEO Colin Campbell posed an interesting question on Twitter yesterday: “If .CLUB launched in 1985 would it be more popular than the not for profit .ORG?” The .Club registry has done a masterful job at promoting its registry, but I would say the answer is no. What do you think?
  • If you want to learn about what domain names large companies are buying, Jamie Zoch and George Kirikos are two people you should follow on Twitter. Even if you don’t care about that, both of those guys are regularly uncovering sharing great domain name information.
  • Privacy.com was popular on Hacker News this week. They offer a neat credit card solution, and it’s a fantastic domain name.
  • April Fools’ Day is coming up at the end of the week. I am sure there will be jokes all around.
Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
  1. Theo is a very talented designer but that is not his best work. It’s merely font with a green square behind it. My opinion but the reason embrace is such a great term is it involves warm feelings. A hug, a want. It needs to have a warm feeling, a welcoming feel. Colors that invoke that. A green one color logo is anything but.

    Again, I am not a designer and I’m not one to criticize logos because they are personal. But I know Theo can do fantastic work, I’ve seen him do it. I bet others agree that the logo is too plain and cold for the word embrace

    • When you look closely, the bright green square becomes a backwards “E” that is embracing the first letter of the name. I’m using the brand to sell domain names, so I think the green color works and I like the simplicity of the concept.

      I would likely agree with you if I was using it in another manner.

      Separately, I think you are right about logos being personal. I’ve learned not to ask while the logo development is ongoing because not everyone is going to like every logo and it can be a frustrating process to try to get a consensus.

    • I did miss that. That does make it better. Like George said, more a penetration than a hug,

      Theo,

      Stlll think your talent is at home with your cat on this one. Heading out the to nursery to help water. Gotta stick to what I do best. šŸ™‚

  2. Shane, Happy Easter. Educating me about brand design would be akin to me pretending how to best water perennials. Each should stick to what they do best.

    There is no “green square”. The use of negative space in design is utilized in this logo, with a light green reverse “E” embracing the darker one. That was the concept I proposed.

    The colors were chosen by Elliot from a set of options, as was the font and adjustments thereof. Embrace .com isn’t about hugging your domains, it’s about selling them.

    • George – there is a certain amount of intimacy with one’s domains, don’t you think? šŸ˜€ The intention is to create a brand that can be both visual and memorable.

      Should Elliot decide to sell the domain, e.g. to a social services NGO, the color scheme would be “warm and fuzzy.”

  3. Oh please, grow up, no need to dicker around with this logo crap on Easter Day. Please guys, go out and smell the lilies.

    This is what you get when you smell the chicken/steer manure all day in your nursery. It clouds your thinking process.

    For Arco, go to Romeu’s Cuban Restaurant and have their fried banana chips.
    I was at the MiamiOpen and a friend brought me there for dinner.

    Forget about China Chips or non 4L chips craps, go eat the fried banana chips while watching the hot Latins on Miami Beach.

    • when you look ‘just’ at the logo there is little sense, but if you use it in the word : embrace , it is difficult to read because there are 2 green colors.

      he can try to use dark blue ( or the blue black used in escrow.com because it was the first association i got..)

      the logo is just not cold not hot.

  4. I hate to tell you….logos are like women/men, some like hot, some like it cold, some like it brown,black,yellow, white, green, purple….it all comes in all kind of colors, some like it short, chunky, fat, skinny, tall, etc etc

    Move on……………life too short to talk about damn Logos!!

  5. The logo looks like a green square from a mobile device zooming in shows the inverted E, changing colors might show it better.

    • Ron – I did not design the web site, just the logo. On a mobile device the logo would be served full-width, if the design were responsive.

      A brand sits on a variety of media: web, print, video etc. Colors are a personal choice, I presented options based on the concept.

  6. >”.Club CEO Colin Campbell posed an interesting question on Twitter yesterday: ā€œIf .CLUB launched in 1985 would it be more popular than the not for profit .ORG?ā€

    It’s an interesting question considering how one may view what it means to be “more popular.” It may also be a bit too much of an apples and oranges comparison.

    There is also the issue of tending to view things in terms of present day reality.

    Strictly in terms of number of registrations, with today’s reality I would be inclined to agree with “no” as the answer, or probably no. The term “org” fits and goes so well with non-profits the way “com” goes with commercial, the way your favorite driving gloves fit your hand.

    However, when you try to place yourself back in time, I would suggest things would “probably” have been very different.

    There is quantitative “popularity” and there is qualitative “popularity.” The former means more registrations regardless of how people feel about or like the TLD, while the latter can mean either more, less, or the same number of registrations even though people may love the TLD much more than the other and be much more greatly attracted to it.

    So putting yourself back in time, remember that this was the period of discovery and excitement, the honey moon period, the great new cyberspace frontier, just as captivating and alluring as the “final frontier” of space people had already been attracted to and gone to before.

    With that perspective, I would suggest that if “.club” had been released back then, the qualitative appeal would have been so captivating and exciting to people that at a minimum it would have been “more popular” in that sense, but that it is also entirely possible it would have matched or perhaps even exceeded .org worldwide in terms of quantitative adoption as well, or at the very least have very possibly and realistically been close in numbers. But not as apples vs. apples, merely as two different ships traveling in different waters, each having their own place.

    • John,

      A thoughtful analysis. It was simply a hypothetical. Clearly today .org far exceeds .CLUB and it is unlikely .CLUB will exceed .ORG now or potentially ever. That being said, it would have been a different game had it launched in 1985. I also think that .WEB would be larger than .NET had it launched in a the beginning of internet time. All of this is moot but fun to think about relative value of an extension based on time of release.

      Colin

  7. Great logo. It really depends who like what. Every time i got logo design there were always takes and non takers. Thats life. All in all i think its very strong design and represents embrace well. Eliot, i would actually focus more on the site, which is right now seem a bit under developed. Maybe add few banners for site you really want to sell.

  8. A brand design is structured around the focus of the product or the service.

    Shane Bellone’s FishStick.com is a great example of a literal interpretation of a brand, on purpose. Not many liked that either. I think it was brilliant, fun and worthy of a mention here.

    Abstraction is a method that goes beyond the basic principles of design, and if the literal interpretation is hard to understand, I can imagine how hard it is to get this variant.

    I’ve personally stated that clip art + text does not equal a logo: http://acro.net/blog/clipart-plus-text-does-not-equal-a-logo/

    That’s why anyone’s view of a brand design aside from the client and the designer, is essentially irrelevant. Outsiders always lack the client’s vision and the designer’s ability to recreate a concept.

    On a fun note, watch this video if a warm and fuzzy embrace is what you’re after. šŸ˜€ https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/714251417079263232

  9. “Theo is a very talented designer but that is not his best work. Itā€™s merely font with a green square behind it.”

    Shane is a very positive guy, but that is not his friendliest comment. It’s merely a grin with a nasty dig behind it.

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