We’ve been busy!  Here are some of the things we’ve been adding to the features available to you on weRead:

* Half star ratings - No longer bound by whole numbers, the half star is your solution for that book that is better than three, but not quite worth four stars.

* A new logo

* Facebook - we’ve introduced more options on facebook so you can post to your profile and set your feed options

* tags - Now you can categorize all the books in your bookself, making it easy to sort and find the books you want

*Discussion boards - both for authors and books, this has been live for a few weeks so you can engage in loads of debates and discussions throughout weRead.

* Authors corner - if you have claimed an author page, you can now add or remove books from your books written list, edit your pen name, photo and date of birth right from within your profile page.

Have fun using all these and more, send us your feedback, and look for even more features to arrive as we make weRead more social!

Recently our creative team was charged with creating the new logo for weRead. Obviously there were initial questions to be answered.

“How do we say ‘Social Network for Book Lovers’ in the form of a tiny dingbat?” With monkeys? With monkeys reading books? While wearing hats? Unfortunately that one didn’t go over too well.

Someone suggested a book. (Light bulbs going off in head). Actually a lot of people around the office suggested a lot of things. We listened to some, threw Nerf darts at the rest. After a few weeks of collaborative design (a few bottles of beer, some bourbon and a take out pizza or four, we came up with a final design).

By the way, thanks to our international team of commentators who couldn’t see the book no matter how hard they tried. (There is no book, there is only you. Or whatever that spiritual prodigy tells Neo in the Matrix.)

The weRead logo consists of 2 elements. The main element, which is the book, and the secondary element which is the speech bubble. The book is self-explanatory. If you need more explanation, email us and maybe we’ll come up with something after we finish off the rest of the bourbon.

The speech bubble represents the social aspect of weRead. It is the simplest, most common sense way we could come up with of expressing the fact that weRead connects people who want to talk about books. These days the speech bubble itself has become a symbol almost as commonplace as any letter of the alphabet. It’s consistent and easily recognizable as a symbol for communication. So put the book and the speech bubble together and these elements communicate the goal of weRead: to be a discovery platform for books.

Potential sticking points:
1. Is the speech bubble overused? Maybe. We say it has been abused, and we are officially reclaiming it.
2. Should Comedy Central and CNN really be using a speech bubble? We think not. However we do feel it is appropriate for weRead. It represents the company itself and isn’t used gratuitously (except when we need a plus one or some swag).

Conversely we have no problem in the gratuitous use of red and blue, because they
make you want to read tons and tons of books (ok, maybe not really, but it sounds good). The colors are vivid, the boldness of each provide a feeling of fun and energy, not to mention we also liked the fact that these colors looked good with the carpet in the office.

The overall cleanliness and simplicity of the logo succinctly sums up weRead. We picked the font Neutra, a mid-century font true to the international style that stands for innovation and progress. It has a unique enlarged x-height of the lowercase letters (that means that the top part of a letter like “b” is really tall) and increased contrast in its strokes for enhanced readability. Most of all it’s easy on the eyes for us old folks and those of us with ADD, which is pretty important.

- the creative kids at Lulu and weRead (Rob, Nuno, Caroline & Manny)