A Logo is a design symbolizing ones organization. It is a design that is used by an organization for its letterhead, advertising material, and signs as an emblem by which the organization can easily be recognized, also called logotype. Logotype is a graphic representation or symbol of a company name, trademark, abbreviation, etc., often uniquely designed for ready recognition.

You may also think of a Logo as a simple visual mark to identify your company product or service. There are different types of signs and emblems easily recognized and associated with purposes. For example, crests are used to identify a country or family. There was a time when only big enough organizations could afford to make their own crest. They were in some cases very detailed drawing with many objects to enrich the crest. Cost was not an issue and more was considered better. Then flags were used due to their larger format. They were visible from the craft fields from long distances. Road signs were designed for informational purposes. They use such techniques as contrasting colors, simplified and yet stylish formats to identify and attract more attention and convey information.

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US Department of the Interior participates in an alarming new trend by crowdsourcing their logo design.
Can you hear the bells toll?
Today, the logo design profession has died. Alright, fine, it has not died yet per se, but a very severe blow has definitely been dealt to it. If not treated quickly, this blow could even turn out to be mortal.
What happened, exactly? Well, it appears that the US Department of the Interior has decided to crowdsource a logo design. We have already spoken of crowdsourcing in our blog previously, so you know why it’s dangerous, and you know why it’s rather immoral. You also know that, despite all this, it’s currently the most Read the rest of this entry »

Risto-Jussi Isopahkala’s project “Logo Tourist” invites us to see famous landmarks in a whole new light.

What if the Eiffel Tower was made not of metal bars, but of pieces shaped like Xerox’ iconic pixilated X-shaped logo, crowned with Budweiser Anheuser-Busch’s logo, with the A and the eagle? What if the Louvre was made of AIG, GAP, Caterpillar, Adidas logos?

What if someone built an entire city made of nothing but the symbols of the most successful brands?

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Budget's too tight? Can't spend money on logo design? No problem! Just download one of these high quality logos, for free! Simply throw in some customization of your own, and you've got yourself a logo!

Each logo design was created by LogoBee designers using Adobe Illustrator. They are provided free of charge for you to download in scalable vector format (Adobe Illustrator CS3). Click the picture of a logo to download it.  For more freebies, check out LogoBee's first free logos collection here:

You are welcome to use these logos for your business or for personal use, but we have to ask you not to distribute them without permission.

Logo #7: A series of hills with a church in the distance, a single star gently shining in the skies above. The outwards shape of the logo suggests a cross or perhaps a star. Peace and quiet are conveyed by the smooth colors and curvy lines of the logo, making it an ideal choice for a church.

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Google are well known for their simple yet innovative products, all aimed at getting us to click on those ubiquitous monetized ads. Google’s best known product is undoubtedly their search engine. Used by an estimated 300 million people every day, the web page may look relatively simple, but uses some powerful search technology to deliver accurate results every time.
To keep the search page interesting, Google have built up something of a cult following by changing their “doodle”, or logo, almost every day. Halloween sees the G.O.O.G.L.E. bedecked with cobwebs and spiders, at Christmas time it’s flashing with fairy lights and glistening with snow. Sometimes, the doodle is just for fun. Thursday 7th September was one of those “miscellaneous” days, and yet on that day, the infamous logo sparked a Twitter frenzy and even made the news.
The logo appeared fragmented into balls of color that moved away from the user’s mouse pointer, only to settle again when you typed in the search bar. Web developers the world over scratched their heads in puzzlement – how did they do that? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuNNcdD6G9A)
Speculators have proposed that the atomized Google logo made use of a new technology called CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheet). Here, each ball of colour was in fact the element of a web page, coded to look circular instead of rectangular, and to move away from the cursor at any point other than the search bar. Clever, eh?

All things in life change. Technology evolves. The same can be said about human mentality. Therefore it is really not surprising that art, and of course design, is undergoing constant changes.
The nowadays worldwide, famous organisation YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Organization) is a prime example of this rule, having gone through many logos over the course of its existence.
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Back when it was announced that Rio de Janeiro would host the 2016 Olympic games, their candidate logo was quite frankly a bit strange. In fact, I don't quite understand what was it meant to represent. My best guess is that it's probably a weird hybrid between a heart and some kind of flower. Of course, it might also have been some kind of insect. Or two headless people hugging a reversed pine tree. Seriously, people should not be taking lessons from the London Olympics logo already discussed on this very blog. Non harmonious shapes, strange coloring and awkward positioning, Rio's candidate logo was not quite as bad as London's pile of scrap, but close up there.

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In part 1 of this blog post series, we looked at the process of developing a brief for a graphic logo design project. Asking the right questions in order to build up a scope for the project is a crucial first step for the graphic designer, who needs to obtain enough information about the company, its values and the image it wishes to portray, to be able to develop a striking and instantly recognizable logo. There inevitably comes a point in this process however, where the designer needs to start actually designing, so what happens next? While each graphic designer has their own modus operandi, the design process generally starts with a good old fashioned sketch. Forget your Photoshops and your Illustrators for the time being, a graphic designer’s real best friend at this stage is a 2B pencil and a piece of paper.

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It’s always a risky move for any corporation to change its logo, and when internationally known clothing retailer Gap tried it recently, they soon learned that the customer is always right!

With industry experts suggesting that Gap was feeling out of touch with its client base in these times of economic crisis, a Gap spokesperson said that “after 20 years, it was time for change”. It was out with capital letters and a serif typeface, and in with Helvetica logotype and a blue gradient box design element – to the outcry of graphic designers and members of the public all over the world. 

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Just as promised by the poster, Logorama does indeed feature “spectacular car chases, an intense hostage crisis and wild animals rampaging through the city”. It even features the end of the world. But all of this is not what makes this animated short film so unlike any other.
 
What does is that all of the characters in the film, as well as settings, and as a matter of fact just about everything – are actually logos, brands and mascots.
 
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Today's market is unfriendly for designers. So unfriendly indeed that many of them cannot even find normal work... "Professional designer" is a species on the brink of extinction. But what cataclysm, what catastrophe is responsible for this? The answer to this riddle is simple: the ever-increasing popularity of spec companies.

The owners of those companies grant their clients an immense variety of logos, at the lowest prices anywhere! The secret to their success? Merciless exploitation. Really, one might as well call them slavemasters, as they summon hundreds of designers and pseudo-designers too in order to conjure up a myriad of logos for a company... yet most of those designers shall not receive a penny for their work. This is shameless devaluation of creativity. Sadly, clients, anxious to receive a vast panoply of logos for almost free, bite straight for the lure, forcing logo designers to play the same game and accept offers for spec work out of desperation... Alas! In their avidity, clients cannot realize they are ensnaring themselves in a trap, as very soon, there will be no true professional designers remaining at all. With logo design companies dying out from lack of clients, could it be that the profession "logo designer" may soon be labeled "EXTINCT"?

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While most logos are created by professional designers, sometimes, even a child can come up with something beautiful.
 
Jessica Du, an 11 years old girl, has done so, and has deservingly won the Doodle 4 Google competition. Her design for Australia Day is simple, yet particularly cute and charming, drawn with the kind of innocence only a child could achieve. Diverse typically Australian animals (emu, koala, cockatoo, kangaroo and snake) form the letters of the word “Google”. The idea of the logo is besides perfectly clear, unlike that horrendous London Olympic logo treated in another one of our articles. Merely looking at these cuddly creatures will give anyone a desire to protect wildlife.
 
Yet one feature is missing from the final design: the aboriginal flag, standing for the second letter “o”. To be more precise, the yellow circle remains, the rest of the flag is gone.
 
To be fair, the logo didn’t lose much from the purely esthetical point of view. Perhaps even gained a little harmony. Yet it simply feels incomplete now. This yellow circle has been orphaned of its meaning. Every other letter is a symbol, yet this circle is just a letter “o”, colored yellow with a swirl in it. Not to mention that since the logo had to be altered, the final version lost some quality, and appears rather blurry compared to the original.   Read the rest of this entry »

The role of the graphic designer in creating a great logo for a particular company is a very important job – that logo will be used on the company’s advertising and marketing materials, on their website, on emails, on letterheads and stationery. It speaks volumes about the company’s ethos, its style, its purpose. A logo is a focus point for the eye, and a point of reference for the brain.

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To answer this question, it’s firstly important to establish that there is a difference. Web design is the art (and science!) of building a website. On the surface, a web designer is someone who makes a pretty website by arranging blocks of text, images, and other elements into an attractive and eye-catching design that will inspire a site visitor to take a closer look at the product, service or information being offered. Delve deeper however, and you’ll see that web design is highly technical and includes the use of some complicated-sounding programming languages. Speak PHP, Ajax, BASH, AWK, TCL or Python, anyone? Graphic design on the other hand was traditionally a print-based profession, and the design process still generally begins with pen-and paper sketches. Nowadays, the internet and computer software such as Adobe Illustrator now go hand in hand with the job. Graphic designers create logos and corporate identities, and design packaging, advertising, letter heads, brochures and more. They work with typography – not only the traditional black and white, or Pantone 2 to 3 color logos, but increasingly these days, full color logos incorporating gradients, transparency, 3D shadows and more edgy effects. A graphic designer may provide the artistic and aesthetic talent towards creating the look and feel of a website, and mock up where on the page the different design elements should go, but the web designer is the responsible for converting this mock up by splitting the graphics into images, polishing the design with software such as Adobe Photoshop, and then using web coding to translate the design onto the screen. Since the global recession, design companies have been increasingly looking for multi-skilled jacks-of-all-trades who can perform the role of both graphic and web designer, thus cutting costs and getting two skills for the price of one.

Disruptive Business Models and Negative Incentives

Outsourcing has become a growing trend in a variety of industries. As firms become more specialized in the products and services they offer, the need to outsource certain tasks has become apparent. A small business will probably find it more cost effective to hire a tax accountant than do it themselves. They also will probably want to hire an artist to create their logo design and brand identity. This has all become intuitive to companies that need to focus more and more on their core business. But what happens when the service company out-sources its own contracts?

This model of 'double outsourcing' is relatively new in the business world. It leaves the service company with virtually no overhead, only control over marketing, advertising and administration. In the logo design realm, this means that designers from all over the world will be contracted to work on any given project at any given time, working through a centralized network to submit their work. This free-market mechanism allows designers to bid freely on jobs, set their own hours and work as they please.

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