Welcome to the new Logobird

Its been nearly 12 months since Logobird was launched. Overall its been a great year with the site steadily growing – completely exceeding my expectations.

Despite doing rather well so far, the time for change had come, and here you have it – the all new Logobird.

This post will give you a rundown on some of the changes to the site and what you can expect from us going forward.

We have switched domains

Firstly, we have ditched our .com.au domain in favour of a .com address.

Why the change? When Logobird was launched I never envisaged that the blog would have so much international reach. I made the assumption that most of our readers and clients would likely be located in Australia, and therefore .com.au domain made sense.

Evidently, this assumption was short-sighted.

Despite being on a .com.au domain, over the past year traffic from the United States was double that of Australia. We also get significant traffic from the UK, Canada, Brazil and India. I attribute this to two things; the relative popularity a few of our blog posts and the global reach of social media.

As an additional by-product of this, more than 50% of our clients are now located overseas.

While in the short-term I am sure that our Google rankings will be adversely affected by the domain switch, thinking long-term I feel it is definitely the right thing to do.

If you have a link on your site pointing back to us, I would sincerely appreciate it if you update it with the new URL. Thanks!

We have an all-new design

Okay, this one is obvious because if you are reading this post, you are probably looking right at it. If you are reading this in an RSS aggregator, please click through to the site and take a look.

While the old site design served its purpose, I no longer felt that it was inline with my own design sensibilities. Hence the need for change.

As designers we evolve, and I think it is important that our own personal brands keep up with the change. Its important to remember that we are managing the direction of our own brand, not just our clients.

With the new site I wanted to achieve a much cleaner and simpler look, removing the distractions and putting the focus on what I think is most important to our readership – blog content and our portfolio.

The site redesign was done by Jay Hollywood (@Jay_Hollywood) through his studio, Humaan.

I originally came to know Jay through Twitter and was aware of a few of the projects he had been working on, in particular Launchlist. After a few email conversations with Jay it became apparent that he understood my vision and shared similar tastes in design.

In the end, he did an absolutely exceptional job with the site. Jay is by far the most talented web designer/developer I have had the pleasure of working with.

The entire site has been rebuilt around the blog

One of the things that I am most excited about is the migration of the blog to the homepage.

When I originally launched Logobird, I simply lacked the confidence to put the blog centre stage – doubting if anyone would actually read it. In hindsight however, this was a big mistake. We had a lot of traffic hit the old homepage during the year, only to exit the site before visiting the blog. Traffic that could have been converted more effectively into subscribers or clients if it had of been directed straight to where the best content was. Anyway, lesson learned.

Moving forward you can expect more articles covering logo & identity design, typography and graphic design. Additionally, we will be featuring a lot more opinion posts on corporate identity work.

In terms of the blog, there is also one other major change. More on that below.

Introducing Chirps

Chirps is our new design inspiration blog. It will feature interesting design related links, videos, infographics, projects, and portfolios, that I find while trawling the internet on a daily basis.

Considering that I virtually live on the internet, I do tend to stumble across a lot of interesting stuff worth sharing (or at least I like to think so). If something does not warrant a full-blown detailed blog post, Chirps is where you will find it.

Chirps is also sharing our main RSS feed. For our subscribers, this will mean you will be receiving updates much more than previously. I do assure you however, we will only be featuring top-notch quality material.

Meet the other Logobird

A little known fact about Logobird is that we are actually a partnership – its not just me.

The second half of Logobird is Natalie, my lovely wife. While she has preferred to stay out of the limelight, she is an exceptionally talented graphic designer in her own right. Her creativity has been an integral part of our success so far.

I had to twist her arm, but there is now a profile of both of us over on our new about page. Check us out.

Lookout for our 1 year anniversary giveaway

In 2 weeks, it will be our one year anniversary. To celebrate, we have lined up a huge (and growing) pool of prizes to give away to our Facebook fans and blog subscribers.

I am still working out the logistics of everything, but I assure you that the entry process will be dead simple. If you like free stuff, trust me, you won’t want to miss it.

If you haven’t already, please make sure you ‘like’ us on Facebook and subscribe to our RSS feed to stay updated.

That’s it

Anyway, that’s enough from me for now.

What do you think of the new site?

Please share your comments below.