Jan 15, 2013
|Last updated on October 20th, 2020 at 08:29 am
Here is one of the early logos used for 4starBrazil.com:
From 2001 to 2010, the logo consisted of various versions of Papyrus script, in the colors of each countryβs flag. For 4starArgentina.com, where the company listed all its Argentina Tours, this was the banner:
And here is the banner for 4starPeru.com, where the company listed all its Peru Tours:
As you can see with these early logos, the founders decided to play around with fonts, colors, and arrangements, finally settling on the Papyrus font, with forest green to represent the forests and jungles of South America. βWe chose the colors to reflect colors we associated with Brazil,β explained Bradley Nehring. βThe deep green reflecting the nature (forests, jungles) and the flag of Brazil, and the brown of the mountains, earth, and βBrasil woodβ from which the country got its name.β Β When adding the other sites, the founders tried to maintain this color scheme idea, using the colors of the Chilean, Argentine and Peruvian flags in the logos of the respective countries. (See the Argentina and Peru logos above). In 2007, the company was awarded the coveted website domain name www.SouthAmerica.travel, byΒ Tralliance, the administrator of .travel domain names.
By 2009, the company was known as SouthAmerica.travel (pronounced βSouth America Dot Travelβ), and all 4starSouthAmerica sites were consolidated on the SouthAmerica.travel website. In 2010, the founders decided to settle on an official logo that would represent the whole company. They asked for inspiration from a number of specialists in logo creation.
Surprisingly, the best designs came from a company in India, which offered 11 designs from 11 different designers. The result was the current logo, a bold & colorful icon consisting of a stylized image of the continent of South America as the backdrop, split horizontally with a blue wave representing the oceans. The top half of the continent was orange with an overlay of the sun, representing the golden beaches and sunshine of South America. The bottom half was forest green, symbolizing the forests and jungles of South America:
βOnly when a colleague in our Buenos Aires office pointed out that the logo reflected the colors of Brazil did I realize that elements of our original logo β the colors of Brazil, the Papyrus font, indicative of the forest β survived to the final logo. That was a bonus β a logo reflecting our roots!β But choosing among the 11 different prototypes sent by the logo company had been β¦ amusing. Some of the other contenders were quite good, including this one, where something just didnβt seem to be quite right: (Perhaps a penguin or piranha would have been more appropriate!)