1) What do you think this logo says? 2) How long did it take you to decide what it says? Resurrecting this topic: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=552854 With an update. This went on the backburner for a while, but it's been revisited. Any fresh eyes want to take a crack at what it says? Anyone who saw the original care to comment on the updated version?

Well this is my second go around, and now I think it says "Koiro". I'm very obviously wrong. :)

I feel as though the design is beautiful in a sense, but in another sense it hurts my eyes. There are so many conflicting directions and influences going on that I have to keep going over and over the image trying to capture everything.

If you eliminated the perspective transformation on the text, then I think it would be great! The text is lovely, especially the elongated style and little serifs.

I would have to say the same as halifax2 about the 'hurting of the eyes'. Something comes off to strongly, probably not the contrast because ussually white on black / black on white works quite well so I am going to have to guess that halifax2's comment on the different directions would be that problem, that said I was able to figure out that the Kotiro was the spelling you're after without much wasted effort. Overall, it is a simple logo design but something is fighting.

There is way to much activity going on in that logo. To be honest I would not be putting text in a circle for a logo if its more then a few letters. Just makes it very cluttered, and a person glancing at it would not immediately recognize it as a name.

You could try by shrinking the lettering (as you did with O and T), and remove the outward matching point on the final O. That would serve a double purpose, as it both would unclutter the design, and remove the overly center focal point due to the "I" which causes your eyes to jump back and forth.

Your logo is an optical illusion. You're creating a series of high contrast lines evenly spaced apart. The human eye is very poor at dealing with that, hence why you'll get endless "eyes hurt" comments.

If you have to ask people if they know what it says then it's a bad logo. Don't rationalize it, just get rid of it. "Don't get married to your first love" would be the popular artist's saying for this situation. Decent idea and nice attempt, but not cutting it as logo. Move on, next idea.

The "Kotiro" title on your site is nice. Readable, clean, very nice typeface. Could apply well to wide range of themes. Much better direction than this circle one.

For me, I don't mind the circle.

I've seen (and made) plenty of logos with much more text than that, arranged in a similar way, that dont look cluttered.

The pointers I would give are:

A) Get rid of the serifs in the font, they're what I think is creating the "cluttered" impression.

B) The eye-hurting part of the illusion is coming from a miss-match of shapes. You have text forming a relatively angular hexagon, in a smooth circle. What you could do - is either turn the circle into a hexagon, so that it borders and matches the shape that the text is making, or vice versa. Like so:

If you even have to ask other people if they can read your logo, you should already know it's horrible. A logo is supposed to be an easily recognizable glyph to identify you or your company. A hard to read logo is self defeating.