3D Printed Logo for Google Keep

My newest favorite Google app is Google Keep.

It's a quick scratch pad, list keeper, note-taker, image-grabber, doodle-maker, even voice-note-taker app. It's fast and it works on every device where I need it - my phone, my kid's iPhones, and the web - and it lets you share notes with other people.

Google Keep is perfect for that shared grocery list or those quick meeting notes, or that inspirational idea keeper...

But wait - this is not an app review - this post is about the Google Keep LOGO.

Design Goals

I was simply looking to represent yet another Google app logo in a form which could be used as a key-chain or backpack charm. I've done this, as you probably know, with a few other Google Apps, so it seemed fitting to now do Google Keep, since I use the app more than once a day.

The Google Keep logo is a light bulb on a small note pad looking base with one corner turned up. One of the goals of all these logo models is to keep them simple so they print easily and quickly. In the case of the Keep logo, I had a couple of options.

The base was easy, but my options for the light bulb seemed to be either to make it just a cut out into the base, or to make it stick out vertically from the base.

Design Process

The individual parts which make the bulb and base

I started with the easy part - the base. This was a variation on the Google Docs, Sheets and Slides base - that is, a rectangle (square in this case) with a turned up corner. I did the same thing as before, creating the square foundation at about 40mm square and 4mm high, then cut off one corner and rotated it about 135 degrees to appear to be turned up.

To make the bulb, I connected a round sphere to a cylinder. I then created a smaller cylinder at the bottom of the first to represent the bottom part of the electrical connection on a light bulb. I also cut a small gap about halfway down the larger cylinder to create the slight horizontal line that the logo has. I did this using a narrow, wide cylinder and then using the subtract tool to cut it out of the longer cylinder.

Now, I had to try two variations.

On the first, I simply subtracted the whole bulb shape from the base to leave a cut-out in the base in the shape of a light bulb.

On the second, I also cut out the light bulb shape from the base, but I made that cut-out slightly larger than the bulb and placed the original bulb centered in the middle of that cut-out. I then created a simple cylindrical connector to attach the bulb-base to the logo base - so the light bulb would be connected but still appear to be floating.

On that second variation - which looked quite good - I simply had to flatten the back side of the rounded bulb so that it would lay flat on the print bed along with the logo base. I only realized this after trying to print once and having a slightly artistic looking failed result ;)

The Model

This is the first time I created a logo model with two variations - but I like them both, so I'm posting both here.

The first is the cut-out light bulb.

The second is the floating light bulb.

Both models are HERE.

Hope you print lots of these for the Google Keep app users you know!