For the past 16 months, the Fayetteville Flyer has been mostly faceless in terms of a brand. Sure, there have been a few variations of the unicorn hog (unihog?) that appeared in the header bar over the course of time, but there’s been nothing by way of an actual logo.

That’s not to say we haven’t tried, though. Not a day has gone by without us sitting down and tinkering with a multitude of different ideas. It’s just that nothing ever stuck.

Part of the reason for that is because the site has been constantly evolving since day one. Whereas we started as a simple blog that only a few of you checked on a daily basis, the Flyer has become a full-on community complete with thousands of readers, a lively group of regular commenters and a handful of contributors who graciously donate their time in an effort to help us all celebrate the city we love so much.

Bingo!

A few weeks ago, we hit on an image that seemed to encompass exactly what we wanted both in terms of a mark that could stand alone and something that could be incorporated into the name of the site. But we didn’t stop there.

It seemed only fitting to ask our readers what they thought so we took to the interwebs and began asking for some critiques. Twitter was our main avenue for getting input and about a dozen of you who were up past midnight last week actually helped mold our rough draft into a complete logo.

A few variations of our new logo.

So what is it?

At the heart of the mark is simply two letter Fs back-to-back which, of course, stand for Fayetteville Flyer and there’s a couple of punctuation marks in the middle but the rest is up to you. What do you see? We’ve heard lots of interesting ideas so far such as a butterfly, wings and even ears.

We’re very excited to have finally come up with something we’re proud of and that we believe is able to walk the line between professional and fun. And we’re even more excited to have been able to incorporate some of our readers’ suggestions in the mix.

What’s next?

We’re constantly striving to make things better around here and we’re always looking to add new features. As always, we’ve got a lot of high hopes and about a zillion ideas for the future and now that we can finally put the initial stages of branding behind us, it’s full speed ahead.

Currently, we’re really excited about our local band directory which is coming along nicely. It’s a never-ending process, though, so if you don’t see your favorite band on there, keep checking back because we’re getting a couple of submissions each day and we’re adding them as fast as we can.

We’re also working on a local information section will all sorts of valuable content like polling locations for elections, basic info about owning pets in Fayetteville and even a micro directory of things like schools, hospitals, venues, etc.

Thanks!

For real, though. Thank you for continuously stopping by. You’re what keeps us up at night and I mean that in the best of ways. Without you, we’d be talking to ourselves here. As always, feel free to let us know your thoughts, to tip us off on news or to just say hello. Thanksandgoodnight.