Logo Design

So at work I was asked to design a logo for this group here. I want to go through the process I took to get to the final logo for those of you who aren't designers and don't know all the steps and time it takes to design a logo. This is just some of the steps I took (minus extra doodles, thumbnails, thinking, etc).

The group already had a pretty good logo to me, but they needed to match the branding of another logo. I had to stick with their same original color scheme of the red and gray, but match the new logo with the logo they were going to be sharing their site with. This shows the original logo and original name "ILES" and the logo they wanted me to make it kind of match (my bro took my original design and tweaked it with a new font and added the extra colors when he was a graphic intern here at work...go Dan!).
After I received the logo, I started playing with ideas. Here was my first set of thumbnail ideas until I later found out that they changed their name to SGST (go figure). You can click on the images to enlarge it.

After I made the above logo ideas, they liked stuff with the "swoop" since it matched the JKDDC logo best. They also wanted me to include more colors from the JKDDC logo. I remember them saying they wanted to keep with their original color scheme since they didn't want to have to recreate all the color-schemes on their website. So I decided to just include the color purple on it instead of all the reds, greens, blues, etc. I figured it wouldn't stray too much from the original gray and red they already had. Below is the next set of thumbnails. Some which include the title.
Then they chose some that they liked from the group above and wanted me to change the swoop around a bit more. So additional logo ideas are below.


After much thought, they narrowed it down to 2 logos....finally!!! So this is their new logo.