Continuing our look back at 2008 – some of the more memorable moments on our blog, at the shop and around the design world in general. Yesterday, we left off our design year in review with June, but as posting was very light during the summer (actually, I got nuttin’ for July and August), we’ll jump right into September’s notable moments…
September 2008
We started off September with the release of Logopalooza 2 – the second volume of our free logo design book series. If you haven’t snagged your copy yet, Logopalooza 2 is still available here. We followed that up a few weeks later with the release of our second studio-made movie, this time a logo design workshop & tutorial video that illustrates in a very real way why Photoshop shouldn’t be used to develop a logo. If that wasn’t enough free goodies for one month, we also released our first logo design podcast dealing with, fittingly enough, ‘Starting Out Right‘. We looked at some of the nasty vector files that get passed off as professional design services in our bad designer, no donut feature, while looking at a typical project at the shop with a logo case study, the first of several that will round out the year. We doled out some letterhead design tips, business card design tips and took a look at clip art logos. Rounding out September we re-introduced our Copycats Gallery, which if e-mail is any indication is becoming one of the more popular areas of our website.
October 2008
Seems we were in an case study frame of mind during October featuring several in-depth step-by-step articles featuring logos developed at the shop. We took a look at how a simple logo design can often save a project that’s gone off the rails, a look at an illustrative logo design case study, and explored an extreme logo design project where the details where, well extreme. We also walked readers through a decent little food company logo project, detailing the early concept rounds right through to business cards and letterheads. What month is complete without yet another Apple logo lawsuit, yet another logo design contest discussion and another example of our stuff being ‘borrowed’ by other sites, this time our Golden Rules of Logo Design article. We also wondered aloud about changing The Logo Factory logo, the first time that’s even been mentioned in over 13 years.
November 2008
November was a particularly busy month at the shop and blogging went on the back burner. Still managed to offer up a few design morsels that deserve mentioning. We looked at the new Montreal logo, a design that has residents all-a-flutter. While we spent a lot of time over the year looking at the negative aspects of logo contests and so-called ‘design crowdsourcing’, there are, naturally enough, some opposing opinions. We introduced you to Spec Debate, a new site where pro and anti design contest folks can has out their differences. We also talked about yet another copycat, and detailed once again our ongoing battle with some Indiana outfit called HiTech Paradise to take our stuff off their site. If you read yesterday’s year in review, you’ll recognize these guys as same cats who pinched our logos to gussey up their ebay logo auction page back in March. Some people’s children, huh?
December 2008
We ended the year on a strong note, with some fairly interesting news bits and opinion pieces. But first, we had to deal with yet another copycat. And another. While I really should know better, I wondered into the design contest debate that we told you about last month. Apparently, we’re not the only logo design company having their material pinched wholesale – Utah’s Logoworks site gets knocked off completely leaving simple folks like me to wonder exactly who’s who in the online logo game. Speaking of which, in our logo design review expose we take a look at the recent outcropping of these supposedly unbiased review sites and discover that most are nothing more than a front to pimp this-or-that design company. Going along with our new ‘expose’ theme, we also reveal some logo design search engine secrets and reveal how the sites that rank highly for ‘logo design’ keyword searches do it. And while these sites are never going to go away, we discuss the trouble with design crowdsourcing. Now the US Presidential Election is over, the dissection of the Obama logo design can begin. Complete with a couple of nifty videos too. We ended up the Christmas month with a cheeky look at why you might not want the logo design gig and reveal the top seven warning signs that a project will go off the rails. In the last week of 2008, we finally got with the program and put ourselves on twitter. Though I’m still not sure what all the fuss is about…
And there you have it – a years worth of The Factor in two (not so) short posts. Hope you enjoyed reading our scribbles as much as we did putting them together over the last 365 days and will continue to do so throughout 2009. And as we’re officially in the last few hours of 2008, let me take the time to wish you all a Happy and Prosperous New Years’ from all of us at The Logo Factory. See you next year…
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