Graphic Design Employment Opening. The Logo Factory has one immediate design position opening in our Mississauga studio. Applicants need to be able to demonstrate the ability to work in a fast-paced (some might say chaotic) creative environment. If you take a gander at our logo design portfolio, I think it’s pretty clear what it is we do around here, so we’ll move on with the pertinent details of the position. Here’s who we’re looking for and what we need them to do.

One Full Time Design Position.

Mac Head Prefered.
Design, illustration & drawing capabilities a must.
Experience in Adobe Illustrator a must.
Ability to juggle sizeable (from time-to-time) project load.
Ability to work with minimum supervision.
Ability to discuss projects with clients.
Internet & Web Savvy.
Some other things that might be of use – Flash, HTML, Dreamweaver experience.
Not much else to say – check out our portfolio. If you’re capable of creating stuff just like this, then we’re probably looking for you. Naturally, we’d like to see some logo design samples.

Salaried in-house position with benefits.

Send resumes, education and job history, graphic design portfolio .PDFs and whatever URLS you’d like us to view to info at thelogofactory dot com. If you seem like the right mix, Tasha will contact you for a face-to-face. Sorry, this is an in-house position only.

Also, due to the volume of applicants that we typically get from job postings, we may not be able to get back to everyone (although we’ll do our best) other than the folks we’d like to meet personally. If you’d like further information, you can always contact the studio. We’ll be accepting applications for the next ten days, then we’ll start contacting qualified designers for interviews at the shop.

Even though it was published on The Factor a few weeks ago, e-mail and comments are still arriving about our are logo contests legal feature. I’ve already written one follow up piece on the hornet’s nest, so I’m not going to write another (today at least).

While reading some of the ‘in favor’ opinions expressed, I was struck by a commonality in most of the messages - presumably from younger designers - and a central theme to their point of view. They didn’t support contests per se - in fact, many realized that it was a fairly contradictory way for a designer to conduct themselves, especially if they wanted to add the term ‘professional’ after their name. They understood that they were underselling their services, arguably exploited by contest site owners (who I have zero sympathy for) and contest holders (for whom I have very little).

That’s certainly fair enough. Many of these designers expressed the same rationale for entering their work for consideration in these dog-and-pony forums - a lack of alternative ways to get their names ‘out there’. Many saw logo contests as the only way to seek clients, to establish portfolios, and to promote themselves online. They viewed the internet as a vast resource of untapped clients, but had little idea about mining the online market, and saw contests as a means-to-an-end.

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Taking a quick root around our website this morning, it occurred to me that while we’ve featured a mass of logo design tips, examples, design articles and technical file format guides, we’ve never actually sat down and developed a ‘how-to’ design guide - a soup to nuts instruction manual on how you can develop a own company identity, whether for yourself, or if you’re a designer, for one of your clients. This happened, partially due to economic self-interest - we’re a logo design studio after all - but mostly because we believe that the best way to develop the symbolic representation of your company is by working with a fairly experienced graphic designer, be it The Logo Factory or someone else with similar credentials.

While we’ve tackled the other ‘do-it-yourself’ methods - sometimes critically (witness our recent are logo design contests legal feature) - we’ve yet to walk anyone through the entire logo design process, from start to finish, while helping you avoid the various missteps and potential pitfalls when it comes to developing a logo that is timeless, and representative of the subject it’s meant to symbolize. So, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Over the upcoming weeks, The Logo Factor is going to publish an exhaustive look at how to develop a logo, as a do-it-yourself project for yourself, or as a guide for the young designer who wants to design logos as part of their practice. We’ll revisit material that’s covered elsewhere on our site, but update it and assemble it together in one spot. As the guide will be featured in a blog format, you’ll be able to ask questions which the gang at the shop will do their best to answer. Once we’re finished, we’ll assemble the entire shooting match as a free e-book download. While I still believe that working with a pro is the best answer, the age of ‘do it yourself’ is upon us, and if you want to create your own logo, you might as well do it right. We’ll begin the series on Monday with a look at deciding whether or not you need a logo, followed later in the week with choosing the name of your company, as well as the theme you’re going to use as the DNA of your design.

Over the years, we’ve acquired quite a few domains. Various permutations of our company name, side projects - both realized and not - as well as a slew of logo and design related domain names that we’ve sat on, either for future projects or to keep cyber squatters at bay. We’ve registered the hyphenated versions, the misspellings (that’s how we ended up with TheLogoFactor.com) and every version of The Logo Factory you could imagine.

One of the pearls of our domain portfolio has to be logodesign.net, a fairly decent chunk of prime internet real estate, and a domain address that we’ve always thought would be handy for one thing or another - especially if you’re in the logo design or a related industry. We’ve had numerous studio think tanks on what to use logodesign.net for - a repository of logo information, company logos, another blog or even a network of designers - but to be honest, we’ve yet to come up with anything even remotely applicable for such a prestigious address. Will we at some point? Perhaps, but for the foreseeable future, other side projects, and the day-to-day at the studio will use up all our available time.

Seems a shame to let such a great domain go to waste, so we’re offering up logodesign.net for sale - if the price is right. What’s the right price? Who knows - it’s been informally appraised in the 5 figures, so that’s a good starting point. We’re in the middle of setting up the sale through a domain broker (where the sale will be open to bidding) but figured we’d announce it here first, so that readers of our blog can have first shot. We’ll be handling the sale through escrow.com so there should be no worries about the legitimacy of the sale.

If you’re (seriously) interested, contact the shop and make an offer. Hell, we’ll even throw in the nifty logo that we designed for the domain, if we ever got our act together enough to put something on it. Conversely, if you have any ideas on how to utilize this great web address, we’d like to hear that too.

Update: We’ve listed the domain with domain broker Sedo. You can bid on logodesign.net here.

Since we opened our doors in 1996, The Logo Factory staff have worked on thousands of logo design projects for clients all over the world. During the course of these projects, our designers have developed an equal number of concepts, sketches and digital doodles that, for one reason or another, didn’t make the cut. Weren’t exactly what the client was after, or as a result of direction change, the designs were shelved. As we’ve always maintained a strict ‘no recycle’ policy - we never utilize previously deigned work as part of any custom logo workup - these designs have remained on our network hard drives, collecting digital dust. So what happens to this artwork? From time to time, we make some of these material available as free logos in our Morgue Files. Also, a few years back - 2001 to be exact - we offered some of these designs as stock logos through our Logos in a Box website, but discontinued the fairly successful service a year later - the website was never up to par, and the ordering system was a little wonky. Work loads being what they were, we never had the time to do the service justice, nor to develop a catalog system that would efficiently track limited and exclusive licenses. Until now. After a fairly lengthy development time, we’ve relaunched our Logos in a Box stock logo service, complete with a face lift and nifty inventory system, and have begun populating the database with an inventory of pretty cool designs, available for purchase as limited and exclusive licenses. Developed under a kind of ‘if you can’t beat them’ philosophy, Logos in a Box was formulated as an alternative to the plethora of sites offering logo templates and generic flash driven do-it-yourself logo generators, the quality of which has always been mediocre and the ownership issues suspect. It won’t be suitable for every application, but Logos in a Box still offers clients the opportunity to work with our designers in the customization of their logo, but as the conceptual stage has already been taken care of, at a fairly decent price break over a ‘from-scratch’ development offered through our standard logo design packages.

How does Logos in a Box work? Quite simply actually. Log on to our LIAB website were you can access our inventory of stock logos. These are not logo templates or clip art, but rather professionally rendered designs from some of the best, and most experienced, logo designers in the industry. You can select either limited purchase, or exclusive one-time buyout logos, in a wide range of styles and color palettes. Whenever you find a logo that’s appropriate, you can purchase it right away and then work with our designers through our customization process. We’ll add your company name, change colors, move the elements around - everything you need to make one of our Logos in a Box unique to your particular application. Once you’ve approved your new logo, we’ll prep everything into professional vector logo formats and web files for download right off your client page. That’s all there is to it.

Within our Logos in a Box inventory you’ll various types of logos, including the highly illustrative logo style that The Logo Factory has become noted for. You may even recognize some of the works from our logo gallery (we sometimes use designs from the process, rather than the selected logo). On some of the LIAB material, we’ll even give you typography suggestions in order that you can better visualize how an illustration or icon will look once it’s worked up as a full-blown logo.

We’ll also announce notable additions to the Logos in a Box inventory here on The Factor - about a week before they’re made available to the public, so that visitors to The Logo Factory core site will have the opportunity to grab designs as they become available. Check out our Stock Logos section on the blog for news of pending releases.

Here’s a nifty project that we’ve finally completed - our first video logo design demo reel - over 300 logos in the span of 3 minutes. In order to save some time, I utilized images that were already available on our web site, either on our daily logo archives, in our logo design gallery, or featured in our Classic Logos portfolio. At some point I’ll probably lose all the frames and watermarks as well as demonstrate some logo animation samples and techniques. Overall, not bad for a couple of days worth of work. The raw Quicktime source file for this animation is the better part of 100 MB, with a compressed Quciktime Pro version of about 19 MB (if you’re so inclined you can see the higher resolution 19 MB version here) but I figured I’d compress it and shoot it up to our You Tube account so that people can have a looksee. If you dig the music, you can download the MP3 here.