This is a guest post by Dennis Salvatier, blogger at Tanoshiboy and designer at Salvatier Studios, an award-wining design studio located in Southern California. You can reach Dennis through his website or on Twitter.
Crowdsourcing Won’t Help You
In the last few years crowdsourcing has become the single greatest enemy to design, more so when it comes to logo design. Let’s start off with an explanation about what crowdsourcing is.
This is when a company or an organization offers a… Read more
Every now and then I like to throw an opinion out there on Facebook or Twitter, and gauge the reaction from my followers.
Sometimes they agree, sometimes they disagree, but it always helps me to achieve some perspective on a particular issue.
A few weeks ago, I sent out this Facebook post:
While I admit the post was a tad melodramatic, I stand by it. In my opinion, Google AdSense has no place on a design blog. It’s spammy, kills… Read more
Whether you are doing it solo as a freelance designer, or run your own design studio, your chances of success are pretty slim unless you learn to manage client relationships properly.
I have been running my own design business for around 2.5 years now, and while I don’t pretend I know everything, there are a few tricks I have picked up along the way.
In this post, I will be sharing 15 rapid-fire bits of advice on how to manage… Read more
A new logo controversy is upon us with the news that the NBC Universal logo has been redesigned – dropping its globe silhouette and iconic Peacock.
The redesign marks the takeover of NBC Universal by media conglomerate Comcast. With the takeover NBC Universal has also been renamed to NBCUniversal.
Old NBC Universal Logo
New NBCUniversal Logo
Before getting all up in arms about the change it is important to note that the iconic NBC network logo (pictured below) will remain… Read more
A new logo for HTML5 has been unveiled by the W3C – the international community responsible for developing standards for the web.
The new logo will primarily act as a badge for web designers and developers, giving them a standardized symbol to inform visitors that parts of HTML5 has been implemented into their site. Important to note however, the logo does not imply validity or conformance with web standards.
The new identity for HTML5 was developed by Honolulu-based Ocupop. Here… Read more
A new Starbucks logo has been unveiled.
“we’ve given her a small but meaningful update to ensure that the Starbucks brand continues to embrace our heritage in ways that are true to our core values and that also ensure we remain relevant and poised for future growth.”
– Howard Schultz, Starbucks president and CEO
A well executed logo redesign
As one of the most recognised brands in the world, this logo redesign is a bold move for Starbucks.
What the… Read more
The new Rio 2016 Summer Olympics logo was unveiled on New Year’s Eve at a Copacabana beach party in Brazil.
According to the official Rio 2016 Olympic games website:
The brand translates the Olympic spirit and the nature, feelings, and aspirations of the athletes, Rio and the cariocas. Different countries, athletes and peoples are joined in a warm embrace – in an individual and collective move, which at a second glance, reveals one of Rio’s most beautiful icons, a vibrant… Read more
Have you ever wondered why some designers produce amazing work, while others just mediocre?
Great designers eat, breath and live design. Great designers are passionate about their work.
Most importantly however, great designers never stop learning.
Successful men, in all callings, never stop acquiring specialized knowledge related to their major purpose, business, or profession. Those who are not successful usually make the mistake of believing that the knowledge acquiring period ends when one finishes school. The truth is that schooling… Read more
I was recently having a discussion with another designer who claimed that most talented logo designers are naturally gifted. The gist of his thoughts was that some designers simply had an ‘eye’ for creating brilliant logos. In his words, you either had ‘it’ or you didn’t. To give examples of designers who he thought had ‘it’ I was referred to some logos he had seen on a popular logo design gallery.
If a logo design was a competition based on… Read more
This brief guest post was written by Perth-based Customer Experience Design and Marketing Consultant, Bernadette Jiwa. The article is in response my previous post on Google and logo design. More food for thought perhaps.
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Couldn’t you just throw your hands in the air and jump up and down doing a merry dance at the unfairness of how Google ranks logo designers.
The good guys (and girls), the really great guys can’t possibly get a look in. Search is flawed, … Read more
If you are a blogger or an avid reader of blogs, you are probably well aware of the ongoing problems with the RSS subscription service, Feedburner.
While Feedburner has always had its problems, over the past few months the variations in Feedburner subscriber stats have been so erratic, they can no longer be trusted. I have seen subscriber counts fluctuate 50-70% on any given day. Many other bloggers have also reported on the same issues with huge Feedburner fluctuations.
This… Read more
Picture this. You sit down in front of your computer in the morning, eager and ready to get some work done. Suddenly, you realise that a couple of hours have passed and you are still on TweetDeck, trawling though Google Reader and checking emails.
You wonder to yourself, what on earth happened to the last 3 hours…
I am sure that the situation above will sound familiar to many of you. It was a regular problem for me, that was… Read more
Over the past few months my RSS feed reader of choice, Google Reader, has officially gone into meltdown. Well not the application itself, but more so my ability to manage the 412 blog subscriptions that I have “acquired” over time.
This is not the first time this has happened either. It was only about 6 months ago that the number of sites I was subscribing to crept up to a whopping 564. Mental chaos ensued, I then slowly peeled that… Read more
This is a guest post by Erik Ford from we are pixel 8, a boutique design and marketing agency with offices in Los Angeles and New York. You can follow Erik on Twitter or read more of his writing on the wearepixel8 blog.
I am a graphic designer. Does that mean I am a logo designer as well?
I will start off by saying that the answer to that question is an emphatic no! Now, before you start screaming at… Read more
A little over a week ago saw the release of the much anticipated Brand Australia logo, with the phrase “Australia Unlimited” termed to market Australia overseas.
According to the official Brand Australia website “Brand Australia aims to better position Australia as a global citizen, global business partner and world class destination. Brand Australia will use the country’s many achievements to sell Australia as a unique, strong, fair and future-focused nation.”
Fair enough. So what is the reasoning behind the new… Read more
When is it OK to straight out ask someone to promote your content?
You know, send someone an email or tweet and say something like “Hey, I wrote this really cool article, can you help me promote it? http://bit.ly/bO2hMo ”
I am not sure if there is a cut and dry answer, however I believe there are many bloggers who are going about it the wrong way.
Self Promotion or Self Demotion?
Not a day would go by that I… Read more
Trying to find a professional logo designer via Google search is an absolute mine field. Why? Because, these days everybody SAYS they are a professional logo designer. However, often nothing could be further from the truth.
The Google algorithm doesn’t understand professional logo design.
Many of the self-proclaimed “professional logo design” firms that you find at the top of the Google search results may design logos, but how professional are they really?
Do they understand professional logo design or are… Read more
The amount of noise in the online design community is incredible. By noise, I mean distraction. Distracting content that is just whizzing around in cyberspace not really adding any value to anyone or anything.
Actually there is so much noise, that it is almost deafening. Due to this, it is becoming increasingly difficult to filter out what is useful from what is, well…rubbish.
Think about it. There are already countless design blogs, and dozens more being launched everyday. There are… Read more
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