These are the steps of logo idea development for AlphaTech Inc, going upwards.

There were lots of rough sketches and attempts before the #"-4" came about, but they are not relevant for the final idea, so not displayed here.

I wanted to play with "Alpha" as the key for the logo, so googled for any possible meanings and usages of the letter. I've looked at "alpha-dogs", "alpha-stars" etc.

-4 concept was based on alpha as a wing's attack angle in avionics, and I took this straight into the logo and the tag line, but the result looked too academic and archaic (interesting how those are often synonyms in my mind ).

-3 was a development on the above idea, after more sketching, to use the "ascending force", display the "wing" at the top of air-trails, turn air-trails themselves to display letter "alpha" (a good idea, I think), and make the whole logo fast and light.

After testing on colleagues and family it turned out that "alpha" was hardly readable in -3, so -2 was born - a rather weak attempt to point at the obvious, with small "alpha" word typed above "tech".

I wasn't happy as this felt and looked like a compromise. So I came up with -1 - "Alpha" is stated boldly, and is equal in right to "Tech" - I did not want to be shy of the company name. The airwaves or the wing did not change.

The above -1 needed to brew some more in my brain, and I almost thought it was final. But a couple of weeks later (good thing I had the luxury of time on this one) I've changed it to what became the final, approved by the customer. The changes I did were for the following reasons:

1. The air-trails' shape was too complicated, and looked like there were a few "twisting" glitches in it that needed correcting and steamlining. So I redid the air-trails to be simpler, with the added bonus of the whole logo now looking more energetic and to-the-point.
1a. The above simplification almost forced me to change the fonts used in the text - the logo image was more energy and less elegance now, the typography had to follow.
2. The wing at the top looked like an afterthought, an unnecessary element, a heritage of a design and idea no longer present in the logo, so I got rid of it with joy. My six-year-old son was not happy with me for doing that, though, he liked "the rocket"
3. Last but not the least, I needed to get rid of the phallic imagery associations, again raised by testing on family. At least make these associations less obvious. I hope I succeeded in this task an this deviation does not need a "mature" rating

Done in Inkscape, a freeware vector editing tool. Helpful comments and critiques are very welcome. Please do not use these logos or their elements without checking with me first.

PS You can see the design for the website of AlphaTech here.