Fortunately our clients have more sense than to plaster their logo over a design project - however we do sympathise with thousands of other designers out there.

Whether you are a graphic designer, or a potential client - this video will definitely give you a chuckle.

The article covers topics pertaining to logo designs such as:

Logo Design Concepts

The importance of brainstorming, viewing the logo designs of a client’s competitors.

Hand-sketching Logo Concepts

Sketching designs on paper is a much more fluid process. Hand-sketching logo design concepts allows designers to quickly determine which designs work, and which do not.

End Requirements for Logo Printing

As a logo can be used in a wide variety of mediums, such as online, billboards, banners and stationery - it is important that the design of the logo is tweaked to fit its requirements.

Use Illustrator for Logo Design

Although Photoshop is the tool of choice for most designers, Adobe Illustrator allows designers to create logos in vector formats - allowing the logo to be scaled without pixelation.

The KISS principle

A logo design should be kept simple enough so that its message is clear even at small sizes. For example, Gina mentions that as a guide, he creates a favicon at 16×16 pixels to determine whether the logo design still looks correct.

Examine the Logo Design at different sizes

To determine whether the logo design appears correctly, print it and examine it at differing sizes. (This includes shrinking it down.)

For a complete (and more comprehensive) list of Gino’s design principles, you can find his article here.

Where have I seen that font before?

The only font missing from the article is the infamous Comic Sans. During our logo design process, we are often drawn to a small subset of elegant fonts. As thousands of other designers use a similar set of fonts for their designs, we will eventually reach a point when modern fonts will be on such lists.

Trajan - The Movie Font

The article also links to a video that highlights “The Movie Font” - Trajan. This font has been heavily used in the film industry, and is featured on trailers, starting credits, posters, and DVD covers. It is truly amazing how many titles have been released with identical font use.

It’s an amusing article, and you will recognise all of these fonts at glance. Definitely worth a read. You can find the article here.

We want to welcome you all to the new design of the “Design Shed” website. As with all design work, the new layout was a combination of hard-work, good design principles and inspiration from the world’s best designers.

Inspiration

• Smashing Magazine’s Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples

Smashing Magazine Excerpt

• Apple Store’s Horizontal Navbars

Apple Store Navigation

Technology

In a future post, we will describe the process of integrating Wordpress and CakePHP - while keeping both platforms completely functional in PHP.