Logo Challenge - One Modified B&W Letter in a Circle

The Canal Group

We are a private investment firm with holdings in diverse areas including commercial real estate, securities, medical devices, technology and other businesses where design is important. We are admirers of industrial design, aesthetics, and a graceful simplicity that can be expressed in a multitude of formats.

The audience is anyone we work with. The challenge is that the audience is not homogeneous. We can work with a retail customer on Monday, an institutional customer on Tuesday, and an investor on Wednesday. We need a design program simple and flexible enough to work with all of them. We believe we've found a model, but we need help executing it for our purposes.

The model we're interested in following is the design scheme being used at Monocle (see http://www.monocle.com ). Monocle is a magazine, but they also co-brand clothing, luggage, and other odds and ends. They have a simple button-like logo of a modified "M" in a circle. We like how they are able to adapt their typeface (Plantin) and their simply designed, color-agnostic logo to just about anything. It gives them a lot of flexibility to see where the brand takes them. We would like to pursue a similar scheme. The name of the firm is "The Canal Group", and we'd like a similar, modified "C" letter logo within a simple circle, executed in B&W. The hard part is how to best execute a simple letter "C" within a circle, but modified in such a way that it is expressed in a continuous line. Monocle expresses a monocle shape at the base of the middle of the letter "M". We cannot figure out how to express the concept of canal or water in a similar vein with the letter "C". That is why we have turned to more talented lights than ours!