After some, er, interesting thoughts and ideas, many of which caused some vigorous discussion between ourselves, we've finally settled on a new logo for Developer Express. If you look in the top left corner of our web pages, including this Community site, you'll see it. We'll migrate it to our installs and other materials as and when we have the opportunity.
The old logo was causing us some problems. For a start the text was in two complementary colors, yellow and blue, and we were finding that on certain marketing materials one or the other would blend into the background. After that issue, we were finding that the text with our name was too small, too timid. Because the text was such a small portion of the area of the logo, the eye would slide over the swoosh and miss out on the actual words.
In essence we needed a bolder, more assertive design. Mike, our chief graphic designer, has done us proud. He's solved the complementary color problem by just concentrating on the blue, he's bumped up the size of the text so that it's the majority of the area of the logo (and updated it to a rather nice sans-serif block font at that), and to cap it all has incorporated a swoosh. It perfectly encapsulates the requirements we had of a new logo and neatly banishes the problems with the old. Well done, Mike.
(As an aside, we'd almost settled on another logo that Mike had designed. Until, that is, someone noticed that it resembled rather too closely a well-known brand of prophylactics that also has a D and an X in their name. Even though our motto is all about improving the developer "experience", we decided it was a little too risqué.)