Create the Logo for a Communication Revolution

The Village Telco - http://villagetelco.org

The Village Telco is a diverse group of people who share a belief that access to communication in the developing world should be cheap and available everywhere. The Village Telco allows any community or entrepreneur to set up their own telephone company or cooperative at very low cost using meshed WiFi infrastructure. We are going to make setting up a telephone company as easy as installing a wordpress blog.

The logo should communicate the essence of who we are to sophisticated and unsophisticated users. This logo should be understandable to someone with a very basic understanding of communications, e.g. someone who owns a mobile phone but not necessarily a computer.

We would like the logo to straddle the technical and non-technical worlds. It should be evident to someone technical that this is a mesh network but that should ideally not detract from the simplicity or elegance of the logo.

We are looking for a logo/motif for our website (http://villagetelco.org) and which can also be adapted for use on a conference banner. If we are successful with this we'll probably follow-up with a 99designs contest to use the logo to put together a better wordpress site.

Key themes to get across in the logo are:

1) the sense of a village, community;
2) phones, this is about access to phones event though it runs on Internet WiFi; and,
3) the mesh, each phone/device extends the access to other devices

Here's an image that is headed in the right direction:

http://reseaucitoyen.be/RCpres2a_fi…adRC8c.png

It conveys the sense of a mesh but it would need to look less European and be more SVG/EPS logo-ish. And the concept of phones needs to find its way in there.

Here is a google image search of "mesh network". Some pretty ugly images but it gives you a sense of what a mesh network looks like.

http://images.google.com/images?q=m…CCUQsAQwAw

Things to avoid:
1) North American or European imagery or worse stock images. The Village Telco is about the developing world.
2) Getting too complex.
3) Mobile phone imagery
4) hexagons/bee-hive imagery
5) colour gradients