The kind of in-depth work you’ve come to expect at our blog. A highly analytical and detailed critique of the newly announced logo for the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.
Looks like a facepalm.
The end.
A faux World Cup logo does the rounds and drives FIFA officials around the bend. Ain’t the first time a prank high-profile sports logo has been mistaken for the official version either.
A little bit late to the party with this one, but we’ve been occupied for a while, and have some things to get caught up on. Ready? Let’s go. A satirical knock-off of the 2010 FIFA World Cup logo that surfaced a few weeks ago has irked a few of the people over at FIFA after making an appearance on a online sports store selling FIFA 2010 merch.
The logo (above left), which features a second abstract figure carrying a machine gun and chasing the first, is what appears to be a tongue-in-cheek spoof of the original, Officials at FIFA didn’t find anything about the redesign terribly amusing, especially as the re-worked artwork kept appearing on websites, replacing the official version. The faux logo was even used by a New Zealand sports store on their World Cup merchandise website, some poor web designer having grabbed it from Google image search without noticing the image wasn’t the original, or official, version. Seems the doppelganger design was turning up in top ten search results.
How an errant 404 page caused 33,000 crawl errors when Googlebot came a calling to our site. And how you can avoid the same issue when using WordPress as a CMS.
A few posts ago, we told you about some issues with using WordPress as a content management system, mostly about using pretty permalinks and their strain on your server resources. Here’s another one, though this little hiccup was caused by my sloppiness rather than a built-in faux pas of WordPress itself.
Google Webmaster Tools
Google webmaster tools is a great resource for anyone running a website or blog. It’s free to sign-up (all you need is a Google account) and it gives you all sorts of diagnostic tools on how your site is performing, how people are finding it, how it’s ranking for this keyword and that. For the sake of this discussion, Google webmaster tools also shows you how Googlebot (big ‘G’s search bot or spider) sees your site, which links are broken, what code is pooched, etc. The theory goes as follows – the cleaner your code, the more efficient your site map, the better Google will ‘like your site. When it comes to showing up in search rankings, Google ‘liking’ your site is pretty important stuff. All fair enough. Now look at the screen cap above, taken from The Logo Factory‘s dashboard. That’s not a mistake.
A quick-and-dirty way to widen photograph backgrounds in about 3 seconds using Photoshop or Fireworks. Cloning Stamp and Airbrush not required.
I’ve been using this little trick for years and figured every designer knew it. A recent chat with a colleague, who happens to be a Photoshop Guru, made me think this isn’t the case. Here’s the skinny. While I was preparing some spot illustrations for our logo design article section (in this case, for a McLogo article that I wrote a couple of years ago) I wanted to use the photograph above. Trouble is, the aspect ratio of the pic is square, I need horizontal, so I needed to widen the background about 25%. Using my tired and true method of ‘background stretching’ I was able to accomplish this in about 3 seconds. No big deal. Funny thing though, my Guru pal was visiting at the shop and he was watching me tinker away on my monitor. When I stretched the hamburger photograph, he looked at me incredulously.
“You can’t do that.”
Why not?
“It’s not right.”
Why isn’t it?
“You have to use the Cloning Stamp.”
No I don’t.
“But it’s cheating.”
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.
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