UPDATE: Could you comment here instead? I had to make some changes 🙂

Would love to hear any and all suggestions: I’m creating a new logo for my wife’s (upcoming) new website at voiceresults.com (just the old one there now).

We’ll also be using the logo on jackets, e.g.:

I like the middle variation below as it seems to work best against both dark and light backgrounds. But the left variation adds color. My feeling is that if we do a solid, we should just use black/white, as in the right-hand variation.

There is also the possibility of doing the middle variation with some color, as in the example above of putting the logo on a black fleece jacket (compared to the white solid). What do you think?

I’ve also tried some variations with sound waves around the microphone, though they seem to complicate things:

When I first started designing the logo, I tried some much more colorful and complex variations, but decided simpler would be better. Your thoughts? Any suggestions, ideas or tips are welcome. Thanks!

UPDATE: Thanks for all the suggestions here and on Twitter. I’ve made some adjustments and am leaning toward a web look like this:

Update: I created a new post because I had to go in a completely different direction after Doug Canning drew my attention to how similar the work above was to some voice icons on both iPhone and Android. This is the new direction:

Before I had to make major changes, this was supposed to be just an update of this initial, overwrought effort:

(We paid someone to do the initial voiceresults site because we needed it in a hurry, and it was okay. But it’s purpose has changed now.)

When I first started trying to design logos, I was pretty good at manipulating pixels in Photoshop, but not good with vectors. Here, for example, is a partially done old retouch of mine:

Over time, I got better with vectors, but my work was still too “busy” to be a decent logo. I lacked design training. Here are some examples of my efforts, one for a client (Uturat) and the rest for myself, trying to teach myself to do logos:

As an example of what I’ve done with my Photoshop hobby, I did accept a job designing a photo-heavy site a while back: