The folks at the Design Shed have viewed this video hundreds of times, and it always brings a smile to our faces.
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.
Gino Orlandi (from YouTheDesigner.com) has published a basic guide to designing a logo.
The article covers topics pertaining to logo designs such as:
The importance of brainstorming, viewing the logo designs of a client’s competitors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The popular technology blog 10,000 WORDS.NET has published a humorous commentary on fonts that have been exhausted through overuse in popular culture.
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.
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.