The old logo gets the job done, the new one tries too hard to be trendy and fails (it also looks very generic). Sometimes the literal approach is a good idea, even if the production value isn’t there.

Not just you. But I'm not a teacher looking to make bingo cards, so my opinion might not count for much.

Unless you are running a site that has to convey a strong sense of exclusiveness or security you can usually get away with a logo that is considered ugly by many.

Same applies to page layouts as long as the value for the user is there.

> on the old one the text looks squashed

If you're just looking the screenshot in the blog (as opposed to clicking thru to a larger view), I think it really is squashed. Try going straight to http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/logo-wager/o..., it looks a bit better.

I'm also not a teacher looking to buy bingo cards, but the new logo is just terrible. Is that really the best you could find on 99 Designs? (99D is down right now, but I was going to see if I could fetch a better one quickly.) I'm not at all surprised it performs worse that the current one. I'll bet it performs worse that just the text "Bingo Card Creator" displayed in basic font with sufficient contrast to the background.

While I can imagine the old logo being better executed, just as an anecdotal impression, the concept behind the old logo seems pretty much spot on to me.