Once again, it’s time to shake things up at the shop

We usually try to revamp our website every couple of years, just to shake things up a bit, or to fix things that may have been broken, or gummed up in the earlier version. Well, it’s that time again, and we’ve begun working with preliminary wireframes and mock-ups of what the 9th version of our site should look like when we trot it out in a couple of months (proposed home page above).

The Dissection

To re-design our website, we usually take a long, hard, look at the pros and cons of the layout, navigation and design bits to see what we can improve, toss out or add. There’s lots of room for improvement in our current site, that’s for sure (you can read about how the current version came to be here) and our re-design will involve tossing most of it out.

Where to start? Our home page is a little bit ‘clown shoes’ for a ‘modern’ web site. Far too much ‘whoo-hoo’ for my liking now. When we first launched this site, I figured color coding all the various sections would be a cool idea (it wasn’t – just leads to more clown shoe vibe) and we’ve decided to go with a more monochrome color theme this time around (we’ve ditched our traditional purple color for blue, at least for the time being).

Our logo, in all its beveled glory is on the top right corner – well, that seemed clever at the time, but in this era of logo on the left, just seems a little disconcerting now. We’ve also ditched the cog shield that’s part of our primary logo, in order to give the logo a nicer, horizontal aspect ratio. And while we’ve always been a little coy about getting into people’s faces about pricing and what-not (a little unseemly for a design company), let’s face it – the design business, especially for those of us marketing online – has become a severely retail environment. In other words, if you can’t beat them…

Rather than the hodge-podge of links now available in our UI, we’re going to strip down the navigation options by about 60% and focus entirely on logo design, as opposed to the ‘all things to all people’ approach we took with our current version. While The Logo Factory is primarily a logo design studio (over 95% of our new work is designing logos) we attempted – too hard I’d now argue – to bring add-on design services into the mix. Sure, we develop websites and animate logos too, but our core business is logo design. That’s our specialty, and by adding a wide range of graphic design services into the mix, we had also weakened our brand to that of a mediocre graphic design company, rather than a leading logo design studio that was, and is, our original goal and corporate mantra. That decision, after a fairly intensive discussion, even led to the internal code-name for our new site build – The Just F**king Logos edition (JFL for short).

No related posts.

Everything you need to know about getting a logo designed (but didn’t know who to ask).

Just putting the finishing touches to this little tome – The Guide to Great Logos – and figured I’d release the working version on our blog before the official launch. Weighing in at 7MB and 220 pages, this ebook uses a lot of the material on our website, some new stuff, logo design examples, tips, technical guides and what have you. Worth a read if you’re serious about logo design, or in the market for one of your own.

Download PDF here

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1. Designing a logo – the definitive guide
2. Designing consistently great logos
3. New Logos Added

It’s been three months since we last blogged, partially due to creative burn-out (we’ve done an awful lot of motorcycle riding) and partially due to some pressing internal TLF issues that required most of my attention and energy (we’ll talk about that later). Now, after taking a break, I’m once again focused and ready to start pounding the keys.

That’s not to say we haven’t been busy at the shop, we have (especially for summer months) and have been working on all sorts of client projects and some nifty internal thingamajigs that I’ll show you here. First up, we’ve decided to embrace the ‘factory’ motif of the shop when it comes to visuals and our own marketing. To that end, we’ve designed a new series of brochures and matching presentation folders slated to roll out next week (from top to bottom, brochure front, inside and presentation folder, below)

We also (finally) took delivery of our new stationery and business cards, Nothing terribly fancy on the letterheads and envelopes but the die-cut business cards are pretty sweet (though I should probably forget a career as a hand model)

Rather than go with a traditional business card, I decided to go with an over sized display card complete with die-cut gear shape. It’s certainly something that’s a little different. The cog ‘teeth’ allow us to tuck the cards into the usual spots – presentation folders for example – but the size had to be small enough to fit into a standard envelope. The back of the card is posted below.

We decided not to personalize the cards at press time, but rather leave a blank spot where staff can write in names, appointments, etc. This gives the cards a personal touch, while saving on the print costs and logistics for multiple pre-personalized cards.

Related posts:

1. Business card design tips
2. Jeff Fisher gets AP attention
3. Why you shouldn’t use Staples for business printing

New Joe Boxer “The Puck Stops Here” kids’ line looks awfully similar to something we designed back in 2004. How similar? Judge for yourself

News of our work getting knocked off isn’t exactly uncommon around the shop. Usually we are notified by other designers, eager to protect the reputation of our industry. This one’s a little different. I was having lunch with an old friend when my iPhone notified me of a new message. It was from one of our designers at the shop – Steve R – who had seen this in the Sear’s Christmas Wish Book. A new line of Joe Boxer kidswear called “The Puck Stops Here“. Oddly, the logo used on the T-shirts, underwear, pyjamas and bath robes looked startlingly similar to a logo he had designed way back in 2004 for a now-defunct Hockey Entertainment company. I was intrigued so the Mrs and I dropped into our local Sears outlet (where the line was festooned all over the childrens’ wear department) and picked up samples of the entire line (let me tell ya, Joe Boxer stuff ain’t cheap). We both had to admit, there were some similarities.

How similar? Let’s take a look. Here’s the original design (circa 2004):

Here’s the Joe Boxer line:

Granted they’re not exact doppelgangers (Joe Boxer version has a dog’s head and the hockey stick is elongated) but it’s safe to say that one of these designs owes parts of its heritage to the other (notice the stars and the hockey figure). Now, how do you suppose the Joe Boxer designer would have come to notice our logo? Maybe it’s because this logo was featured in our old Daily Logo since 2005, and for years (up until we 301′d a lot of our pages last Spring) this was on the front page of Google when someone searched for “hockey logo”. Course, this could all be coincidence and the result of a happy accident.

Or not.

* With apologies to Jimi Hendrix

Update:

As pointed out by Andrew in the comments section, the bulldog head part of the design appears to be an istock illustration.

Related posts:

1. Guardian Angels Hockey Team Logo
2. Meadowvale Hawks hockey team logo
3. From the ‘biting the hand that feeds’ department

In case you were wondering, the music is also an internal work – a little piece I composed a couple of years ago (with just over a minute-and-a-half worth of video, most of the five minute track had to be snipped. You can listen to the full thing below).

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1. Logo design demo reel
2. Not-so-random music track for Monday
3. It’s Tunage Time Again!

After an extended summer hiatus, The Daily Logo has returned

A favorite feature of our legacy site, The Daily Logo is back, starting off with an oldie-but-goodie, Soupy’s Tequila Shack. Keep in mind that unlike our main design blog, new Daily Logos features are NOT announced on our Twitter feed, but exclusively via our Facebook fan page.

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1. And now, onto the website design
2. Twitter! We’re on Twitter! Now what?
3. Google removes Olympic luge logo over concerns it exploited Vancouver tragedy?

After an extended absence, we’ve just relaunched our Daily Logo feature. Again. This time, hopefully, with its new format, we can keep it nice and organized, tidy and oh yeah, daily.

The Daily Logo was always one of the more popular features of our old sites. Launched way back on July 13, 2003, it seemed like such a great idea at the time. A daily dose of inspiration featuring logos from the shop, little back stories about the project as well as some technical information on the featured logo. Designers and clients both seemed to dig it. Upkeep was a different matter.

Alas, that was back in the dark days of HTML, site upgrades were a hassle, and the Daily Logo often drifted to less than daily. Often less than weekly. Sometimes, we went months without publishing a new version. We half-heartidly relaunched a couple of times, even incorporating it into our studio blog a few years ago. Trouble was, Daily Logos were lost in all the noise, wasn’t as cool as it was when it had a free-standing setup, and we never maintained it with anything resembling consistency or enthusiasm.

Relaunching The Daily Logo was always part of site plans last summer, but if didn’t seem wise attempting to relaunch in the middle of a new site build. Now, we think we’re ready. After messing around with the site setup for a couple of weeks, we’ve finally figured out how to keep this thing nice and tidy. Organized. And daily. We’re repurposing some of our older gallery material, as well as some of the older logos from the original version (in order to shut down those old sections of the site), but the reincarnated Daily Logo is now live. Probably won’t get into the swing of things till towards the end of summer, but at least the infrastructure is now set up

Speaking about interesting things we start and then let drift away, we’ve had a few e-mails about our ongoing trivia and quiz feature So You Think You Know Logos. We haven’t forgotten, it’s just the infernal house cleaning and then some issues with our WordPress setup that derailed everything for almost three weeks. Blogs and whatnot will be back to their regular rate come Monday.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, World Cup started this morning and we’re off to watch a football match. It’s okay, we already have the weekend Daily Logos in the bag…

Related posts:

1. The Return of The Daily Logo
2. Daily Logo on Hiatus
3. The Daily Logo: Voodoo

Using WordPress as a CMS has some major issues. How we managed to run into every single one. And how ‘pretty’ permalinks can slow down your site. And why we’ve been absent from our blog

This post is a little geeky, and doesn’t have much to do with logos per se, but a little bit of technobabble about our website in general, and WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System) in specific. If that’s not your bag, you should probably skip. If, on the other hand, you’re interested in using WordPress as a CMS platform, you might find it interesting. If you’re in the planning stages of a WordPress installation, it may even save you from making the same mistake that we did, back last summer, in the initial planning stages of our site overhaul.

Fixing content holes

A couple of posts ago, I told you how the blog would be silent for a few days, due to some basic housecleaning chores that needed to be addressed. Some content holes in our site proper, left vacant by an overhaul back in November. The reasons for the holes are simple. While some people think that The Logo Factory is a largish design company (if you clicked on that link, the lag time you probably experienced is what this post is all about) it isn’t. There’s only Funkenhammer and me tending to the entire website (so that designers at the shop can focus on designing logos, and administration staff can concentrate on, well, administrating). Between the two of us, we only have four hands, and 48 hours a day, so we try to get to stuff as we can, client work and other tasks notwithstanding.

WordPress file naming

Truth to tell, we didn’t even want to launch in November, but file naming conventions in WordPress had forced our hand, as half the site wouldn’t have worked when we moved to our new server (which we were doing at the same time). WordPress allows you to use what it refers to as ‘pretty’ links when naming pages. That means a page to do with stationery design can be addressed as “stationery-design/” and a page about business cards can feature the address “stationery-design/business-cards/“. All very nice and organized. Pretty too (hence the name). Trouble is, WordPress has a real hard time with these kind of links, especially if there’s any files that have similar names. Say there was an image with the file name “stationery-design.jpg” on the server as well. If you’re using WordPress pretty links, the software will freak out, not knowing which file is which, and eventually give up. Same thing for stationery-design.html. Or stationery-design.php. As we had lots of similarly named files and images (not terribly surprising considering our logo design niche), when we moved to our new server, and fired up WordPress for our new pages, the old pages blew it up. We couldn’t run the old version AND the new version simultaneously as originally planned (slowly converting over), so if we wanted to build the new site, we’d have to nuke the old. And launch before we were ready, holes and all. Which brings up to tip number one. Never move servers AND radically change your website at the same time. You’ll run into all sorts of unforeseen issues, especially when you’re changing basic HTML pages into a CMS driven site. Sometimes the files won’t play nice together.

In any case, once we had removed and 301′d the old files (a 301 redirect is server script that sends visitors to a new version of a page), everything was cool. Our new souped-up server worked blisteringly fast, WordPress was serving up pages nicely. We’d get to those empty holes as time permitted, and hoped visitors would understand. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when we decided to fill those holes with lots of lovely stuff.

WordPress pretty permalink performance issues

After about 150 pages worth, our site started to slow down. Dramatically. In weird ways too. There’s up to a 3 second lag time between clicking on a link, and the server loading the page. And when the page finally does load, it doesn’t cascade (preview the page as it’s assembling) waiting to show the page until it’s fully rendered. We added every speed plug-in there is. WP Super Cache. W3 Total Cache. Scripts that compressed our style sheets all to hell. Javascripts too. Our page templates are lean & mean. Optimized the crap of our .JPG and .PNG images. Still, that bloody 3 second lag. Funkenhammer and I have spent the last ten days trying to figure out the issue, blowing up our server too many times to count while doing so. On the weekend, we finally sleuthed it out. Remember those ‘pretty links’ we talked about earlier? They’re the culprit. And as we added more content to the site, it only compounded the problem. Seems WordPress doesn’t like pretty links at all, especially if you’re using ‘pages’ (like our site proper) as opposed to ‘posts’ (as this blog is setup). In fact, the WordPress Codex has this to say:

“For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.”

Turns out we’ve set up our top site in a way that’s almost guaranteed to cause site performance issues and give our server conniptions. While we originally thought the slow response time may have been a hardware issue (despite our server being ‘state-of-the-art’) turns out if our box wasn’t performing so quickly, our pages probably wouldn’t load at all. And while we were fine in the months since the launch (the number of pages is one of the determining factors) once we hit the ‘wall’ (about 150 pages if memory serves) WordPress started having issues. On a slower server, or co-hosted locations, this ‘wall’ would be dramatically lower. The quick fix? There isn’t one (at least, not that we know of). Luckily, most of our server intensive pages (our Showroom and logo design gallery for examples) are standalone pages, outside the WordPress ‘loop’ and don’t suffer much in the way of performance issues. Pages that are in the WordPress ‘loop’ (our logo design articles for example) do. And there’s not a lot we can do about it inside WordPress (even the upcoming 3.0 release probably won’t fix this issue). We can fix it outside WordPress, by changing some of our static pages to .PHP versions and carefully constructing a site hierarchy that matches the one built with ‘pretty permalinks’. In order to avoid file naming problems mentioned earlier, we’ll have to delete the WordPress generated versions from the database. As this removes most of the CMS editing function entirely, It isn’t the best solution, but it will work in a pinch. Alas, this too will take a bit of time so visitors can expect periodic site performance issues in the meantime.

Pretty permalinks for SEO?

By the way, we’re not the only site that’s experiencing these issues. According to what I read on a ton of WordPress tech blogs and forums, there’s lots an lots of others. Here’s something I found extremely interesting too. When researching the WordPress ‘pretty’ permalink issue, I ran into a lot of WordPress SEO experts and self-proclaimed Gurus who were recommending that people set up their sites exactly the way that we did. For the SEO benefits obtained with keyword laden pretty permalinks. And while it’s probably true that ‘pretty’ permalinks have some SEO benefits, due to their organized structure and keyword relevance, anyone that follows that advice will probably have the exact same performance issues that we’re having (depending on the number of pages as well as your server horsepower). Are the SEO benefits worth the risk of performance and speed hit you’ll take? I guess that all depends on your perspective (read our SEO for logo designers for my perspective on search engine optimization). I also found this great read which tackles the subject and suggests that SEO experts are giving the wrong advice regarding permalinks, going as far as calling anyone that recommends using them ‘irresponsible’. While the post was published last year, it sums up our issue perfectly, and there was a healthy debate in the comment section, as blog and site owners argued the value of permalinks in SEO, versus the performance issue they cause. I guess it could go either way, but I do know this.

I wish I had found this article before we started planning our site last August.

Update:

Here’s another issue with WordPress pretty permalinks. Due to the number of server calls required to assemble a page, if you get a spike in traffic, your server resources and processes will quickly get eaten up. That happened to us late Monday afternoon, when a sudden rush of site traffic took down our server, even though it should be robust enough to handle it. On a less robust box, a site wouldn’t last as long as ours valiantly tried to. Taking a look at the WP database, under the WP_options table, the server is throwing tons of errors and trying to write a massive file on every single page view. It’s surprising the site is serving at all.

Update 2:

Some of our hard-coded .PHP pages (our design help center for example) featured relative links to WordPress pages without any trailing slashes (“logo-design-articles/7-golden-rules-of-logos” for example). This was giving WordPress a little more work to do as it tried to figure out where the page is. By turning this into an absolute URL (“http://www.thelogofactory.com/logo-design-articles/7-golden-rules-of-logos/“) and added the trailing slash, it decreased server response time significantly. Still far from perfect, but a little better. Overall, we’re still treading water.

Update 3:

After ten days of buggering about, all fixed now. I’m too wiped to write about it at the moment.

Update 4:

Here’s the short & skinny of this. If you’re using a WordPress CMS setup using ‘pages’ only, DO NOT set up your permalink structure as “%category%/%post_name%” even if you’re not going to publish a blog portion. Pick anything else. You don’t need the pretty link setups (pages do that by default). That’s doubly true if you are planning a blog using ‘posts’. We took a look at some of the database errors from the WP_Options table and they’re so big, they even crashed Microsoft Word when we tried to open them. These errors are thrown on every single page call and get progressively larger the more pages you add to your site.

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3. June 13 – Site update underway

Posting’s been light on the blog for a couple of days (our Twitter account has been dark too), and we probably won’t be back to a regular schedule for a few days (we’ll make up for it with a couple of interesting bits). Had to tend to some general house cleaning around the site and at the shop. We’ve been working on some holes left from our update last winter, and creating a whole bunch of 301 redirects for some orphaned pages that were stranded as a result of the new infrastructure. Other than some obviously new material – the Designer Lounge, Technical tutorial library, Recommended Resources and Logo Design Book sections for example – you won’t notice too much, even though the changes have sucked up all our time for over a week now. Alas, when there’s only me and Funkenhammer working on the site, these things can take way more time than anticipated. We’ve also been dealing with another logo knock-off (bloody Euro Yacht again) that we may, or may not tell you about, depending on the response our initial communication garners. I also owe someone (hi Ross) some material that’s about three weeks late now, so that needs addressing too.

Here’s the thing. Gotta get these things out of the way before we can make a major announcement about a spin-off project that we’re hoping to launch next week. It will be the first of four planned for over the summer. Curious? Here’s a sneak peek:

Long time readers may remember this little nugget from when we outlined ideas for our new rebranding last summer and detailed the concepts and thinking behind the design of our then upcoming site (this one). While it’s really interesting how we didn’t stray from the original layouts, wireframes and concept, that redesign was only part of our overall business plan.

It’s time for phase 2.

Related posts:

1. New Logos Added
2. Happy Halloween!
3. And we’re back…

A couple of days ago, we ran what we thought was a stupid little logo quiz. 10 questions that asked some easy, a few difficult and a couple of tricky questions about logos. We’ve been kicking this idea around for a while and figured it was time to test the waters with a live gig. The response was unexpectedly healthy, with a couple of thousand people taking the quiz on the afternoon it was launched. Folks on Twitter seemed to dig it too, twattering their scores (honestly too, it seems) around the interwebs. Looks like everyone enjoyed the premiere edition of our So You Think You Know Logos? about as much as we enjoyed researching and putting it together.

Never shy about jumping on a win-win bandwagon, we’ve decided to make these kind of things a semi-regular feature. Here’s how we’re planning to roll it out – every day (give or take) we’ll publish some interesting trivia about a famous logo. Who designed it. What it means. Why it’s notable. You get the idea. Each Friday, we’ll run a quiz about the logos we’ve featured that week (we’ll have told you some of the answers) along with a few additions that we haven’t. Sound cool?

We’re going to look at themes, focusing this week on rock bands, and we’ll take a look at the logo of such notables as Kiss, Muse, Emerson Lake & Palmer (for you old cats), The Beatles (for even older cats) as well as some surprises here and there. Some we won’t tell you about, cause we’re gonna ask you to guess. We’ve already got the quiz, and the trivia posts for this week to bed, so they’ll be coming out early afternoon (EST) starting Monday. If this pans out as well as the inaugural version, we’ll make it a weekly event. If some of the little known facts that I’ve managed to beagle out are any indication, I think this is could be a lot of fun for everyone. To be notified of the latest logo design trivia releases, subscribe to The Factor via e-mail or through your favorite news reader.

Related posts:

1. Logo trivia quiz #3. Oddities
2. Random rock band logo trivia
3. So you think you know rock band logos?