Storming the Cloud: UTOSC 2012 Logo Design

So you might know I love to help out with the local Open Source community. Who doesn’t love giving some time to a cause that could change the world? And yet it’s hard to find time in our schedules. Project Day helps with that, and one of the projects at our last project day involved the theme and branding for the Utah Open Source Conference that’s coming up in May 2012.

As much as all we geeks were somewhat sick of the ambiguous buzzword of the year, none of us can deny that “The Cloud” is a fairly important topic right now. Plus, since it’s such a popular term with business executives, we thought that talking about Open Source technology and the cloud might be a great way to help draw in that audience.

The trick was coming up with a fun way to phrase the theme, and one of the phrases I blurted out was, “The Silver Lining.” Alas; everyone latched onto it. I actually liked “Demystifying the Cloud” a bit better — but we all thought that might be a bit too puntastic, but The Silver Lining just sounded weak. “It’s okay,” Mindjuju reasoned, “The designer will come up with some way to communicate the idea without it looking too cheesy.” The designer == me. And thus I was sent home with the impossible task of coming up with a cool logo using that tagline. And I thought about it a lot, but couldn’t love any of the ideas, and thus kept putting the project off til I was faced with a deadline.

I explained my plight to a friend, and he suggested I might try a big thundercloud instead of a care-bear-ish sort of cloud. I thought that might work, but the tagline still sounded off to me. Walking to my car and staring at the thunderclouds forming above me, I started to brainstorm what I could do. I liked the word storm, not just the image. Storm cloud. Almost, right? So I came up with this, and after talking to Mindjuju and Herlo and their consulting with others, the phrase stuck.

What do you think of it? And what does the phrase Storming the Cloud mean to you?