A little know fact, even within Seapine, is that the digital tree is not our original logo. I recently copied files off an old Macintosh Quadra 700 and came across some of our early logo designs. Looking at those designs took me through the evolution of the Seapine logo we use today. Here’s the back story.

When working on the design of our logo in June of 1995, the engineer in me took the logical approach—the logo must consist of the sea and a pine tree. It was so obvious! So we fired up Illustrator and Canvas and went to work.

The final logo combined the sea, the pine tree, and our name.

That logo had a very short lifespan and appeared publically only once—in our first ad in the August 1995 issue of MacTech Magazine. While the vector artwork scaled well to larger dimensions, the quality of the tree tops suffered at smaller sizes.

We needed a solution, so Kelly went to work with pen and paper, and I went to work in SuperPaint (ah the memories of Mac apps of old). Of course, the design processes had its stops and starts. What about circles containing the sea and a pine?

Pretty cool, but not what we were looking for. Ok, this next one’s closer. The tree isn’t looking too healthy though.

Let’s try adding some natural pine color to the tree. 

Yuck. What the ? Ok, this next one is actually from 1992. I guess we tried to carry the ‘80 design style into the next decade.

This one actually predates the development of the tree logo by a few years and features Clarus the Dogcow. (Before writing TestTrack, I explored developing a help system and authoring tool for the Macintosh that worked much like the Windows help system of the early ’90s.)

In July of 2005, after countless versions and revisions, Kelly and I finalized the digital tree Seapine logo and it has stuck with us since.