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.
An innovative logo gets stuck, a shameless (but belated) plug, a crowdsourced logo contest causes an uproar and two others go awry.
Innovative logo gets stuck
When the Smithsonian Institute unveiled their new Department of Innovation blog and representative logo, critics were quick to pounce on the fact that the logo didn’t work. Not visually, but in actuality. The three gears would lock up 
if they had to turn (above left). After coming under fire on various political blogs, the logo was quietly changed so that the gears could turn (above right). If they were real. That got people pointing out that the varying spaces between the gears would lead to the little teeth shearing off. If the gears were real. And if they had to turn. Not the launch anyone wants for their new logo (hope people don’t look too closely to the gears in our logo).
Via: Logo Design Love.
Shameless, but belated, plugs department
Over the summer, while we were on hiatus, missed the opportunity for a shameless plug about our humble shop. Namely a nice little interview with yours truly that showed up in Canada’s The Globe and Mail small business channel on the importance of a decent logo, and the value of keeping a logo simple but smart. Worth a read if you have a few minutes to spare.
Or, the perils of do-it-yourself logo generators. Continued.
Couple of days back, I wrote about buying the WWF Panda logo (for a paltry $69.00) from do-it-yourself logo design site Logo Garden. It was a short and light-hearted ‘take the piss’ post, written to demonstrate the very-real risks of purchasing a logo from these DIY logo sites, especially if you’re an entrepreneur who may not be well versed in logo design and intellectual property to begin with.
Turns out the WWF panda was but the tip of a very big iceberg, with designers finding all sorts of images that appeared to have been lifted from their portfolios (most seem to track back to portfolio site Logo Lounge) and put up for offer as templates on the Logo Garden site. To whit – designer Jeff Fisher writes about various instances of his work being cribbed, repackaged and offered for sale (above is but one example). Over at Rock Paper Ink, and without mincing too many words, Bill Gardner calls out the LogoGarden.com site with Love Thy Logo – charlatan, huckster, moron and thief. Logo Lounge has more.
Now, and after various nasty-grams, DMCA take down notices and a whole bunch of Twitter outrage, Logo Garden are quietly removing some of the more high-profile designers’ work from their site and database of pre-designed icons. Point still remains. Even at $69.00, these do-it-yourself flash logo generators are a very risky proposition indeed. Unless you want to buy Max Headroom as your logo for sixty-nine bucks.
Then you’re good to go.
Or how I bought the WWF Panda logo from Logo Garden for only $69.00.
According to the press release that hit my e-mail account this morning, Logo Garden is “poised to disrupt online logo design and biz card space” with their do-it-yourself logo maker. Ooooh, that does sound swell.
Billed as the ‘fastest growing logo site in the world’ Logo Garden is yet another in a line of Flash-driven do-it-yourself logo generators that promise for a few bucks ($69.00 to be exact) would-be entrepreneurs can avail themselves of do-it-yourself logos without employing the skills of, oh I dunno, a pesky graphic designer (though Logo Garden looks remarkably like another DIY logo site – Logo Yes – and if I were a betting guy…)
Anyhoo, say I wanted to open a new business called, lessee, Steve’s Pandas or something. I’d naturally want a logo that incorporated a panda. So, we’d start off looking for some animals using the funky animated interface…
The launch of another anti-spec work initiative proves that the controversy about crowdsourcing, design contests and free-pitching isn’t going anywhere soon.
If there’s a topic of discussion that’s sure to get most designers riled up, it’s spec work (when a designer is expected to design something in the hopes they may get paid for the designing) and spec-work driven sites like 99designs, Crowdspring, Mycroburst, et al. Many see the spec-work process as a threat to the design industry itself with many practitioners of the craft bemoaning the inevitable ‘commoditization’ of design brought on by globalization, cheap(er) design software and a glut of designers, and would-be designers willing to toss their free hat into the spec-work ring.
Without any real governing or licensing body, designers have been left up to their own devices to protest the phenomenon through grass-roots campaigns, websites and Twitter barrages. Now, fresh on the heels of the No-Spec! website is another anti-spec campaign called, oddly enough, the anti-spec campaign.
Describing spec work as “a cancer within the design industry” and opining that “all designers need to understand their role in fighting it” the website for the initiative features profile pics of designers who support the cause (really big picture of the home page after the jump).
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