Brian Krogsgard scooped us on our own site launch in his Post Status newsletter a week ago, so to say this introduction is a bit behind would be a kind understatement.* Here’s what Brian had to say:

Keep an eye on Cedaro, the general purpose “playground” by the folks of Blazer Six.

I discovered Cedaro last week using magic tricks, and asked Brady Vercher about the project.

“We enjoy the technical aspects of design and development, so Cedaro is going to be our digital playground of sorts, where we share tips, tricks and code, open source as much as possible, and release a few products to keep it afloat — basically just having fun and helping people by doing what we enjoy.”

I have a man-crush on Blazer Six, and they do a great job with AudioTheme. I’ll be looking out for Cedaro, which has a site of its own now, as well as a Twitter account, and a few interesting Github repos. Brady, Brody, and Luke also use the Cedaro name for their WordPress.com portfolio.

Also: I think you have to say Cedaro in a low, slow, gravelly voice. Go ahead and try it now… Right?

The man-crush is mutual, Brian (did this just get weird?). We also appreciate the mention and have the ideal celebrity in mind for future Cedaro voice work. If he doesn’t work out we’re going with Rick from Walking Dead.

Who We Are

We’re the dudes from Blazer Six: Brady Vercher, Luke McDonald, and me (Brody Vercher).

The Name

Cedaro (suh-dare-oh). Say it out loud and it rolls right off the tongue, like it was always there just waiting to escape.

The root word is cedar. Why Cedar? Cedar is durable, multifaceted, and prevalent — all admirable qualities for a product company. Plus moths hate it.

The Logo

Between client work, product work, and a little thing called life, the logo took longer than we would have liked. The difficulty of designing a logo for yourself is well-chronicled. It’s like putting one of those screen protectors on your phone. The damn thing always has bubbles.

One day we were on Skype going over some concepts I had presented when Luke wondered how one of the icons might look with a different font. I figured it’d take less time to make the change than it would to save, upload, and share the revision. Brady suggested I just share my screen; I obliged. Just when I thought we were close to finalizing the logo, all my pitiful, half-baked ideas suddenly had their ugly parts exposed. As I panned through some rough concepts in Illustrator they made me stop on something that hadn’t been presented. From there, I spent a couple of hours tweaking the logo while they gave feedback and art direction.

It was definitely design by committee, over Skype, no less, and it was pretty awesome.* Here’s the result:

We carried over the hexagonal shape from Blazer Six, but wanted to differentiate it through color (that meant no red). We considered a lot of options and solicited feedback from our wives before narrowing it down to orange and light blue. The wives voted blue, but we liked the way orange stood out. Sorry, wives.*

You can check out a lot of the boring process stuff in my CloudUp project stream.

The Site

We wanted something quick for the site, so we repurposed a general blogging theme we built called Shrake. It’s basic right now, but it will continue to evolve as we define what kind of toys we want on our “playground.”

As for future content, you can look forward to a lot of development-related stuff from Brady and Luke.

What Does All of This Mean?

Basically, it’s a public acknowledgment that we’re shifting focus from service-oriented work at Blazer Six to full-time products here and at AudioTheme. We may take on the occasional client project, but it won’t be the core of what we do.

The catalyst behind our new direction is the steady growth of AudioTheme. We’re excited about the potential, and we hope you’ll join us as we share what we learn.

Here are some c-words that we like: clarity, code, curiosity, culture, character, community, care, considered, craft, creativity, consistency, and collaboration. And Cedaro.

*We’re making this up as we go.