I love the new logo for Murrion Software, developed by Gary McGinty of Ion Ltd in Dublin.

Just for fun I wanted to play around with the logo. I have plenty of ideas so I’m planning to have a new Friday Logo Fun ( and even a hash tag! #flf ) each friday for the next few weeks, as long as I can keep coming up with ideas that is.

Logo #1 : Murrion seen in the Wild

The cow on the left was branded too but refused to pose for the photo.

How the Murrion Logo came to be..

Gary McGinty from Ion  came across this tweet from Stephen Crowley on Wednesday saying:

RT @murrion: RT @wubud: HELP: We’d love your feedback on our logo concepts for @Wubud -
please comment on the blog http://twurl.nl/x7f6gz

Gary checked out this blog and saw that Murrion was also designing a new corporate identity.

Taking the initiative on both counts, before signing off for the evening, Gary helped out @wubud with a design draft http://twitpic.com/5n0iy and the following morning he helped out with a draft for Murrion’s logo too http://www.twitpic.com/5ojas

The main logo is a 9×9 square - the lines represent code and an abstracted “M” & “S”.

Gary McGinty from from Ion Ltd got in touch early Friday morning with these designs for Murrion Software.

Gary indirectly  saw my tweet asking if anyone would be able to work on a design for me, which is a story in itself. Its a great example of the usefulness of Twitter.

A couple of other designers, Leon Quinn and Alan McCarthy contacted me too to help with a design. Thanks guys for your time.

Heres what Gary sent to me. The more I look at it, the more I like it. Im looking forward to using it in a few places including a website design, web app UI’s, business cards and letter heads.

Thanks for your work ION!

I recently wrote a PHP script to send me an email when Google refers any visitors to my website. It includes the search terms that a user was searching for and also the address of the page that the user ends up on in your site.

This information is readily available in apps such as Google Analytics though the purpose of this script is to make the information more readily available, to receive updates of visitors in real time via email.

A few people were interested in this little script and so I set up www.whatsgoogleupto.com to host the script and act as a free and open repository where I can upload ongoing changes and improvements.  It was also an opportunity to try out Beanstalk as an SVN repository and SimplePie for showing the RSS feed of recent commits to the Repository.

Since putting up this script I wanted to make it into a Wordpress plugin to make it a little more accessible to people with blogs that didn’t want to be editing the script to add in their own email address etc.

The Wordpress plugin is now done and it can be downloaded from the Tools page. To use it, simply download the plugin, uncompress it, add it to the plugins folder of your wordpress blog, activate it and then sit back and wait to be notified when Google sends any visitors to your blog. Its especially useful if you are trying out specific keywords and to be notified when they work.

The plugin uses the existing blog user details so theres no need to tweak the script to add in your name or email address.

Im looking for a logo to be created for Murrion software. If at all possible I’m looking to get it designed on a budget or in return for some PHP development work / publicity on this blog.

I sent out a message on Twitter late last week and plenty of people were good enough to retweet the message and a couple of designers got back to me, Thank you to all who responded.

Leon Quinn from Reverb Studios asked me a couple of questions and sent me back a design. Here is the design Leon sent back:

It gets to the point and suits my plain tastes. Im worried that its a bit boring though, not a reflection of Leons design, its a reflection of my own tastes and what I described.  Im also not too sure about the icon and I even think it looks good without the icon.

Is it too boring without an icon? I’m developing different types of software but focusing mainly on email marketing related apps and services, should it include some email / communications related imagery?