Gap unveils their new logo to an internet firestorm, Twitter battles between the new and old and a lot of griping amongst the design community. Take our poll after the jump.

Visitors to the Gap website this morning were greeted by a new logo (above right) and critics were quick to jump on the new design. Replacing the retail chain’s famous blue box, which enclosed all upper-case “Gap” typography in a condensed serif is a graduated blend blue box slid under a bold sans serif font. The change isn’t universal, and the original logo remains on all Gap stores (as far as I know anyway).

The Gap chain is made up of over 1,200 stores in North America, 300 in Europe and in various parts of Asia. Interbrand values the Gap brand at almost $4 billion, the 84th most-valuable brand in the world. The internet reaction to the new logo was rapid – critics have spent most of the day bagging the new logo, and a poll in a feature about the switch on the Huffington Post was almost 80% negative at time of writing. “Gap logo” is also the 69th most popular search phrase on Google.

Two related, and dueling, Twitter accounts have shown up in the past few hours – @gaplogo and @oldgaplogo – though whether the accounts are official, or parody, is anyone’s guess. There’s still some question about whether the change is permanent or not. The new logo was rolled out on the hush-hush – no official press releases issued and media calls for comment have not been returned. So waddya think – an improvement or not (poll below)?

I’m leaning heavily towards not.

Update:

According to a new post on the Gap Facebook page:

Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We’ve had the same logo for 20+ years, and this is just one of the things we’re changing. We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.

Accordingly, I’ve added another choice to our poll below.

No related posts.

A couple of weeks ago, The Chicago Museum of Science & Industry rolled out their new logo to mixed reactions (though if you read the comments on this article, the reaction’s none-too-mixed). Gone are the trademark bars with overlaid boxes, crowbarred into the design for the words ‘THE’ and ‘OF’ (trust me, doing that’s always a pain). In their place is a geometric linear treatment consisting of the museum’s acronym, wrestled into a 3D-ish icon. The old serif font’s been tossed too, replaced with type reminiscent of the Bauhaus school of thought. S’okay I guess. While it’s certainly an improvement over the old design, that’s not saying much, and from where I sit, the new design logo is a little too sterile for such a fun, wondrous and interactive environment. I was lucky enough to visit the museum several years ago when in Chi-Town for a conference with the Mrs (and will be able to go again next month under similar circumstances). The place is absolutely amazing, and demands a few days visit just to take it all in. As my time was limited, I had to rush through the last bits and pieces, so I’m looking forward to going again with a little more time set aside.

Planes, trains and other cool stuff

What needs to be said about a museum that has an honest-to-goodness-real-size 727 (United‘s first) hanging from the ceiling? If you’re an HO scale model train geek (guilty as charged) you’ll be equally blown away by the 3,500 square feet display The Story of Trains that sits underneath (Photograph: Interiority) That impressive setup includes 192 custom models of exquisitely detailed buildings and landmarks, nestled amongst some of the coolest model trains and accessories you’re ever likely to see. And…

New modern logo ignores heritage technology?

Sorry, forgot myself for a moment, but that’s the point of the museum I would think. And the new logo, while technically proficient from a design point-of-view, fails to capture any of that Willy Wonka, Alice in Wonderland vibe that’ll turn even the most cynical (guilty as charged) into a small child once inside the giant bronze doors. The new logo ignores the heritage of the museum (been around since 1933 – see here for more of the museum’s history and landmark exhibits) and seems to reflect more of the modern day silicon chip industry rather than the gears, cogs and grease of much of the historical technology on display. If ever a logo cried out for a bloody rocket ship treatment, this design might be it. Not that the logo is completely disassociated with the museum – the upright columns in the ‘W’ are supposed to represent the columns of the building (similarities to the old Enron logo have been noted). The new logo was designed by FutureBrand of New York, leading some to gripe that there were many Chicago-based agencies more than up to the task, and that the budget for the work might have been better spent locally.

Logo introduced during Winter Olympics’ TV spots

In any case, the new logo is but part of a “massive rebranding campaign” that saw the new logo unveiled in TV spots (below) booked during the 2010 Winter Olympics, and a $205 million dollar, multi-year facelift called Science Rediscovered that began in 2008.

The ‘meh’ factor notwithstanding, it’ll be interesting to see how the new brand design pans out (the museum has already ported the new logo onto their website with a nifty transformation animation). Maybe I’ll post a first-hand update from the museum in a few weeks.

If I’m not too busy playing with the trains that is.

Related posts:

1. Chicago ordered to dump 2016 Olympics logo
2. Snippets: The Stock logos on Crowdspring, logo tattoos & Doodle 4 Google flag flap edition
3. The demise of the logo design industry?

From the “All’s Well That Ends Well Department”. Back in 2007, the EU (European Union) announced plans to introduce a compulsory organic labeling scheme across all 27 countries, and a couple of years later, revealed the program logo, designed for mandatory use on products that are 95 per cent or more organic and free of genetically modified organisms (GMO).

Not everyone was happy with the design, including Germany-based retailer Aldi, who raised some concerns (and eyebrows) over the similarities between the new green logo and its own trademarked organic brand symbol (left). After a lot of frantic phone calls, a few red faces and probably a few strongly-worded lawyers’ letters, EU officials backed down, the logo was shelved and the launch, originally scheduled for 2009, delayed until this year. The responsible commission decided that they’d try again, this time opting for a Europe-wide logo design contest, open to art and design students. Final voting was available to the public via the contest website, and some 130,000 Europeans chimed in, helping decide the official design.

Fast forward to today when, after tallying all submitted votes, The European Commission officially announced the winning design (above left) by Dusan Milenkovic, a German student, who gained 63% of the overall vote for his “Euro Leaf” logo. The icon shows the EU stars in the shape of a leaf against a green background and is meant to convey two messages: “Nature and Europe“. Over the past two months, people have voted online to choose the new organic symbol from three finalists, whittled down from nearly 3,500 logos by an international jury. The three logos (above) were featured on the competition website with voting ending on January 31.

“I’m delighted that we now have a fresh EU Organic Food Logo,” said Mariann Fischer Boel, Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, who first proposed the competition when the original blew up. “This exercise has raised the profile of organic food and we now have a logo which everyone will be able to identify with. It’s a nice elegant design and I look forward to buying products carrying this logo from July this year.”

The three top logo designers will be honoured by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development at an official award ceremony that will take place in Brussels later this summer. The three winners will receive prizes of €6,000, €3,500 and €2,500. In case you were wondering, those little squiggly symbols are Euros, each worth about a buck thirty five (or thereabouts).

Not everyone was thrilled with the contest, or the three logos they had to choose from. Organic association Bioform issued a statement by director Leen Laenens, supposedly representing “many” in the industry, that read in part “they (the three proposals) have no visible link with the sector. One could ask the question whether the consumer is aware the an organic product is involved“.

Ah well. Can’t please all of the people, all of the time.

Related posts:

1. Eulda 2007 Logo Design Competition
2. Human Rights logo design contest winner
3. Doodle for Google design competition

Speaking about Apple, seems that front-man Steve Jobs isn’t terribly happy with the folks over at Google, especially over their foray into the cell phone market. Jobs referred to Google’s famous corporate mantra “Don’t Be Evil” as “bullshit” (or “crap” according to Wired) at a post iPad release conference for Apple employees. Googlers were not impressed and Paul Buchheit, the dude who coined the phrase was quoted as saying “I don’t know where people get the idea that competition is evil.” Others were quick to point out that Apple has been holding Google iPhone apps “in limbo”, refusing to approve them for iStore distribution. Oh yeah, Jobs then went and called Adobe “lazy“. There goes that kindler and gentler vibe I guess. [Gawker]

Speaking of Google, their annual Doodle For Google competition is underway. That’s a design contest where K-12 students are invited to have their way with the logo that rests on big ‘G’s search engine home page. This years’ theme is “If I Could Do Anything, I Would …“. Registration is open till March 17, entries are due March 31 and the winning logo will be featured on the Google website May 27. [Doodle for Google]

Speaking about Apples’ iPad, if you don’t have the peanuts to shell out for the Jobs and Co’s latest electronic toy, you can always impress your friends by setting up this paper version on your desk. [Mashable]

Speaking about rebrands (oh yes we were), MTV has taken a hatchet to their logo, a design that’s been a ubiquitous piece of pop culture for almost 30 years. Not terribly much to write about – there’s only a little bit of change in the overall logo design, specifically the removal of the redundant Music Television strapline, lopping off the bottom of the large ‘M’ and a slight perspective tweak. The logo, like many of us who were around for its inception, is also a little wider and fatter. Gone are the vibrant primary colors, textures and pattern fills that were a part of the logo for all these years. (Random trivia: First ever music video on MTV? Video killed the radio star by The Buggles).

The logo revamp is in no small part due to MTV’s expansion beyond “music television” and into reality shows and other forms of entertainment. Apparently, the new logo will serve as a frame for photographic images (below), similar to the AOL treatment rolled out last year. [Black Book Mag]

Related posts:

1. Crowdsourcing is broken. And how to fix it.
2. Snippets: The Stock logos on Crowdspring, logo tattoos & Doodle 4 Google flag flap edition
3. Doodle 4 Google logos

The design of this blog is crap. There, I said what a lot of you’ve been thinking (but have been much too civil to say). Not surprising really. Most of the design was hatcheted onto a default WordPress theme years ago (September 2005 to be exact), when I didn’t have a clue about CSS and style sheets. The layout is hinky as all get-out (the links are red and purple for heaven’s sake). To speak of, there’s no real ‘design’ going on (which might seem odd for a design-themed blog) and the overall look is, well, crap. There are also some content issues that need a little TLC. This blog is supposedly part of a website that’s meant to sell graphic design services. You wouldn’t know it reading this blog.

Over the years, I’ve written about things that interest, motivate, and piss me off. Most of those scribblings are from a designer point-of-view, because try as I might, I just can’t write about “entrepreneurship” with any zeal or gusto. Sure, I tried writing articles and features aimed at buyers and clients, but I always slid back to designer themed articles. You know the drill – discussion of industry issues like the spec work debate and carping about logo design contests. And let’s be honest – most clients couldn’t give a rat’s ass about design crowdsourcing, the legality of logo design contests or any of the issues that I can write about from religion.

Accordingly, and over the years, our studio blog has become unfocused, suffering from multiple-personality disorder (I’m wise enough not to use the term ‘schizophrenic’ even though that was the one that original came to mind). Hell, we’ve changed our blog’s name three times. We originally started calling it Logopalooza (which became the name of our sort of regular free logo book). Then it became The Logo Factor (which was cool and all, but that was culled from a domain that I purchased for trademark reasons). It seems that the blog could never ‘settle down’ for an extended periods of time, and I confess to being guilty of an almost unpardonable sin in marketing – trying to be all things to all people.

As part of our new logo and website design roll out, I took a long, hard, look at our blog and decided to make some changes. I’m bouncing them off readers, because it will fundamentally change how we do things around here. The first major change is the look. The new TLF Studio Blog will be incorporated into the look and feel of our new site design like so (you can view a full size version of the proposed design here);

The mechanics of the new TLF website design can be found here. In terms of blog content, this blog needs to be re-focused on our new brand as well as the core mission of our website. The new version (tentatively retitled Cogs & Gears) will still feature (hopefully) interesting design and logo material – though written to a buyer/client perspective. We’ll phase out my personal rants and raves, as well as a lot of the designer-oriented material that we’ve featured in the past. Not that I’m going to stop writing them – far from it. You see, we’re not discontinuing The Logo Factor blog. Just moving it to it’s own dedicated domain entitled (strangely enough) TheLogoFactor.com.

When thinking about the new direction, it struck me that logo designers and logo buyers often need information from a different perspectives. Designers (should) already know about the various applications of logos across different media. Buyers may not. Buyers may be interested in some very basic information on what makes a good logo. Designers would look at that kind of article as “meh – been there, done that”.

It seemed only logical that a blog that specialized in logo design information would be split into two halves – one for designers, the other for clients and buyers. And like any project around here, before we could begin any earnest development, we needed to create a look and feel. I’ve always liked the idea of a logo being a ‘spark plug’ for a brand, so I decided to keep that analogy for The Logo Factor‘s new blog logo. That basic premise is nothing new (check the bottom of this page), but the actual logo has been long due an overhaul. With all of this in mind, I worked up a new version, complete with font treatment. We’d need two logos, one for the buyers’ side and one for the designers’ section. As much as I like the spark plug graphic, the type workup is very strong on its own, so the spark plug graphic was unceremoniously thrown in the growing pile of “Neat Little Graphics That I’ll Use Some Other Time”.

Still needed some sort of spark plug illustration to use on the site and as part of the overall branding. Didn’t want to use the stock photograph that we’ve used for a few years any more (you can see it on our logo design portfolio page). Wanted something custom, so I created these two 3D spark plugs using the original graphic as a starting point. The two hi-key colors reminded me of old studio markers (little stubby things the name of which escapes me) so I added marker ‘trails’, a theme that I’d work into the blog theme design.

The website setup is fairly straight forward. A home page that features both the design and client options,

And color coded sections for each. Green for designers.

Orange for buyers. Each blog section (set up using two separate WordPress installations and custom themes) will feature categories that (hopefully) will appeal to each reader segment. There’s a lot of decent articles that have become buried in the backwaters of this blog (and thanks to the hinky navigation are next to impossible to find) so we’ll have no content problems for quite a while once we start editing and updating them. They’ll be easier to find is all.

As part of this expansion of The Logo Factor, the plan is to take the best of both client and designers blogs and publish them as self-help manuals (whether they’ll be e-book downloads or dead-tree versions is still up for debate). In any case, we’ll use the spark plug analogy there too. Like so.

In terms of my personal rants and raves (especially when it comes to third rail topics like spec design work, logo contests and the goings on in the graphic design industry) I will be parking those articles on my upcoming personal blog at SteveDouglas.com. Tentatively entitled ‘Dairy of a Mad Designer‘ (appropriate methinks), having my own piece of internet real estate will allow me to distance myself from The Logo Factory proper, something which will give me a little more freedom in how I write and tackle issues and news. I’ve always been cognisant that The Logo Factory studio blog was attached to my studio and held back a little when ranting and raving (some may find that hard to believe I suppose). In any case, the design for my personal blog will look something like this -

As you’ll see, all the new layouts have common features so that they’re visually from the same ‘family’ while being completely unique in focus. Which brings us full circle to Logopalooza, the original name of this blog that was co-opted to become our logo book downloads. That’s undergoing a face lift too, with a new logo and a new website, now in planning stages.

This pet project is something that I’m fairly excited about, but there’s not a lot I can tell you just yet. Still working on the logistics, but here’s a quick overview. For a couple of years, we’ve made a free logo book available from our site. Logopalooza featured designs from The Logo Factory studio, some tips and was used as a marketing device for the shop. We never promoted it heavily but had over 100k people download one version or another and have picked up quite a few gigs from the book distribution. The new version of Logopalooza will be de-branded and open to all logo designers (with some qualifications). There will be a site tie-in that will feature online portfolios and a way for clients to find pre-qualified designers and view their work. No, this isn’t going to be some design crowdsourcing or logo contest copycat – but a talent-finding mechanism that will help buyers find designers without designers having to give away the farm for it to happen. I’ve railed against logo design contests and spec work for years, but have never offered up any alternatives. Logopalooza will hopefully evolve into one such alternative.

There’s not much else I can tell you at the moment (don’t want to give too much away either) but I think that this can turn out to be a fairly cool gig, both for me, and the designers who get involved. I’ll keep you posted with new developments as I’m able.

And that’s that. A whole mess of designing, rebranding, refocusing and expanding of The Logo Factory as a corporate entity and myself personally as a designer. And now we can get down to the business of changing the crap design of this blog.

Related posts:

1. Free Logo Design Book – Logopalooza Volume 2
2. Hey – where Logopalooza be at?
3. Logopalooza – 35,000 downloads & counting…

If you’ve been following our blog over the past few months, you’ll know that we’re planning a logo makeover and new brand roll out for The Logo Factory. In fact, we chronicled the development of our new logo starting here, continuing here, and then finishing up with the ‘final chapter’ here. Long and short of it – we’ve decided to lose the famous TLF house (even though it’s been with us for a while) and use a simple font-driven design and a cog element. Now that this process is complete, it’s time to start work on using that new logo, as part of a new website design that we hope to launch sometime early fall. And just like with our new logo, we’re going to bring you several blog posts that detail this development.

Luckily, we’re not building our new website from scratch and already have an idea of what we want the site to demonstrate, the sections that we require and how the whole thing works together. Granted, over the years our site has become a little unwieldy, as new features have been bolted and duct-taped onto old. There are a lot of redundant pages, many are way too heavy in the text department, and some pages are simply out of place. Fixing those, in terms of the site hierarchy will come later, and for now, we’re going to focus on the overall site ‘look and feel’ as well as the main navigation system. Because in those departments, our site has become positively old and tired.

Here again, we don’t have to start from scratch – we were able to look at our Google Analytics information and figure out which sections were the most traveled and seemed the most important to users. Using this information, we build several website design wire frames in illustrator. First – the header design wire frame.

This will serve as the main interface for the entire site. There’ll be varying sub-menus and what have you, but for all intents and purposes, this will work. (see full size image here). We also needed a footer design. This time around, we’re going to pay a little more attention to social media, using live-link ‘chiclets’ for services like Facebook, Twitter, RSS feed and our YouTube channel. The Logo Factory is relatively active on Twitter, and we have a fan page on Facebook, but other than our blog home page, there’s no way to access them from our site (in our defense, the latest version of our site was built a couple of years ago, before social media became the rage that it is). When building the footer wire frame in illustrator, we decided that we needed a series of gallery chiclets, small thumbnails through which users could access ten examples of our latest work. Adding to our logo design galleries is a bit of a chore, and this would allow us to add new work as it came online, rather than wait months (or even years) before we got around to updating our portfolio section (view a large size image here).

There are areas in which these gallery chiclets would be redundant (our galleries for example) and we’d need a ‘stripped down’ footer design for those.

Now, let’s put them together with a roughed-in wire frame of how the page body will look like. Obviously, this will change in various locations around the new site, but it will give us a starting point from which to work. The amalgamation of the header, footer and body wire frames looks something like this (see large image here).

Now that we know how the site pages are to be structured, we can start actually designing how it will look. First thing to go on the new design is the stock photography that we are currently using in the various sections. When putting together our current site a few years ago, we tried to be too clever by half, using industrial themes and images to portray all the various sections and design services offered at the shop. As anyone that’s ever worked with stock photography will tell you, it’s a time (and budget) saving technique, but after several conceptual hits, you’re going to end up with a lot of ‘misses’. You’ll enter “that will have to do” territory and the original strong ideas will become more and more watered down. Such is the case with our themed stock images (except the spark plug idea, and we’ll talk about that later), so they’re all, save the spark plug, gone.

We are going to use cogs and gears for various backgrounds, but we set up some decent artwork using layered images, rather than one photo “out of the box” (interesting aside: when searching for photos, I couldn’t find an appropriate photo using traditional cogs and gears. We ended up using an interesting, super close-up of a watch mechanism for the header background). We added the 3D cog graphic that we used in our logo re-development phase (see large image here).

Just like our current site, the various sections will be color-coded, but rather than (often goofy) photographs, we’ll add 3D icons and logos wherever needed and if appropriate. Like in our Flash logo animation section (see large image here). In the Flash animation section, the thumbnail images will preview recent Flash animations, as opposed to various artwork examples.

That sort of theme will continue throughout the website makeover. Here’s a peek at our logo repair section.

We’ll also be redoing our blog, but the change there is pretty dramatic, so we’ll save that for another post. In the meantime, here’s approximately what the new TLF Studio Blog will look like (large picture here).

And there you have it. Keep in mind that most of this stuff is first/second stage and a long way from completion. Some things will change, but I suspect the final website design will turn out pretty similar to the images presented here.

We’ll keep you posted as the new design comes along.

Related posts:

1. The design of this blog is crap. Refocusing our brand & redesigning our blog
2. Someone copying your website?
3. Unintentionally funny website names…

if you’ve been following our blog over the past month, you’ll be familiar with the subject of this post. If not, let’s recap quickly. A little while back, we decided it was time for a face lift of The Logo Factory logo. Over the years it had been changed, modified, turned into 3D and generally abused to the point that our own brand has become “unfocused” (ironic for a logo design company). We’re planning a total head-to-toe retrofit of our website, and figured there’s no time like the present to develop a new look for ourselves. We started off with a rework of The Logo Factory house, and threw what I thought were some nifty fonts at it. That ended up with a design that was labeled “Crazy Earl’s Logo Emporium“.

I liked it, (still do) but according to comments on the blog, it wasn’t cutting it. Folks thought the house and the font work didn’t gel. A fair criticsm I suppose. Some, like David Airey, felt the tagline ‘Design Studio’ was a bit redundant (I tend to agree). Others felt that there was “too much going on”. There’s some validity to that, but I liked the visual chaos – the logo has a tattoo parlor, “Olde Tyme Sideshow” look to it that works well in visually representing our shop. Alas, our logo isn’t meant to please me, it’s meant to appeal to clients and with that in mind, we moved on to round two, adding a different, more industrial font work-up. Using Lubalin Bold as a starting point, I customized some of the letters and added a few cogs (an idea we developed in the first round). Once that was done, I tried various setups with the ‘house’ icon. Like so:

I really liked the font treatment, but it just didn’t work with the house. One has a simple woodcut style, the other an almost hardcore industrial vibe. They worked separately but the combination of the two was even less symbiotic than the earlier “Crazy Earl” treatment. Unfortunately, and as much as it pained me, the time had come for a “Sophie’s Choice” kind of decision. Do I lose the house or not?

I had to ask myself “Self, what’s more important to clients? Our house or the words The, Logo and Factory?” The answer, if I’m being honest, is simple – The Logo Factory. The TLF house has a wonderful back story, and while it might tug at the heart strings when people learn about it, does our house history really have any relevance for anyone seeing the logo in a vacuum? Or for the first time? No it doesn’t. At the end of the day, the single most important part of our logo is the company name itself. To boot, the house simply doesn’t work with this iteration, while the font work is extraordinarily solid. After much soul searching and as much as it pains me, the famous TLF house will have to go. Not completely – we’ll still use the house as a ‘bug’ and the occasional illustrative element, but in terms of our main corporate mark, the ubiquitous TLF house is a thing of the past. Some design decisions are difficult. This one, arguably the hardest design call I’ve ever had to make, is for the better of our new branding. I hope. Once the house is gone, we’re left with a very simple, yet effective, text treatment. In order to balance the logo slightly, we’ll expand the ‘Est. 1996′ strapline.

Works in black and white. Scalable to very small sizes. Benchmarks of a serviceable design. Let’s revisit the cog idea. Developed in round one, this concept always worked. It’s industrial, thematically sound with The Factory motif and painfully simple into the bargain.

Okay, so we’re settled. The Logo Factory‘s new logo is above. Simple customized version of Lubalin. The cog when it works. Text only when it doesn’t. Let’s take a side road for a moment or two. I’ve always been a fan of logo ‘eye candy’ so why don’t we turn the logo in an actual 3D cog? Like so.

As a standalone icon with a shadow, this works very well. It’s comfortable within its own space, and still has enough connection to the original flat vector version. I always liked the 3D version of our house, but it was always too far removed from the original source artwork to work really well. Tweaking 3D files like this is no small task by the way – high-resolution render time is about 28 minutes – so never attempt a 3D version of a logo unless you’re willing to spend an awful amount of time getting it just right (see large version here).

As with any logo version that’s a bitmap, we can only use this logo sparingly, and where reproduction permits. Presentation folders. Brochures. Perhaps on our new letterheads (see large version here). As we’re going bleed on the design, we have to use a larger press anyway – might as well go full color, a necessity for a graphic of this type. In order to keep the layout nice and clean, I’ve kept the type simple and avoided any visual flourishes save the gears on the bottom of the page. Those will make sense when we think about our simple second page layout.

As noted in our earlier posts, I’ve substituted Myriad Pro Condensed as our font of choice, replacing Fruitiger Condensed, a font we’ve used for over a decade. The letterhead second page design is simple. A full version of the logo in the gears at bottom.

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’ will allow us to tuck the cards into the usual spots – presentation folders for example – but the size has to be small enough to fit into a standard envelope.

As decided in the last round, we’re not going to personalize the cards at press time, but rather leave a blank spot where staff can write in names, appointments, etc. Gives the cards a personal touch, while saving on the print costs and logistics for multiple pre-personalized cards.

And there you have it. Unless there’s some pretty dramatic developments, I think that’s the final chapter of our stupidly exhaustive rebrand project, a new TLF logo and the beginnings of a design ‘direction’ that we can port to all our material. As for Crazy Earl’s Logo Emporium, I’m going to use that from time-to-time, just to keep our old icon in circulation. As weird as it sounds, I’m too emotionally invested in our house to give it up completely and I’m thinking that design would look lovely on the back of staff T-Shirts.

I know I’d wear one.

Related posts:

1. Reworking The Logo Factory design (cont’d)
2. Dispatches from the design trenches – reworking The Factory logo
3. Food company logo – designs & stationery

A few weeks ago, I told you about plans to rework The Logo Factory logo and walked readers through the stupidly exhaustive process of redesigning a logo. After overhauling The Logo Factory house (long overdue) I set about incorporating the icon into a servicable word mark. I thought we were on the right path, but numerous nay-nays in the comments section gave me reason to pause. My daughter’s “Looks like Crazy Earl’s Logo Emporium” comment didn’t help either. We had managed to develop what I though was a funky ‘different’ approach, but many thought the design didn’t work. Like most designers working on their own logo, I just didn’t know and when it comes to criticism of our own stupid logo, my confidence goes right out the window. While I sorta liked it, I wasn’t sold completely. So in this never-ending saga, we’re going to take another stab. Decided to have a another go at the font work, this time using versions of ITC’s Lubalin. Let’s start with a similar setup to the original rework, arcing the word ‘Factory’.

Oh dear. That’s not going to work at all. All of the elegance is gone. The blocky bottom serifs of the letters make the wording look tossed blindly around the arc. Not good at all. Okay, back to a standard layout – the words on top of each other. Centered.

Nasty. ‘The‘, ‘Logo‘ and ‘Factory‘ don’t work particularly well together. They never have (this was a problem almost 15 years ago with the original Loveletter treatment). Even when centered, they appear as if they’re not. Gonna have to play with the spacing, sizing and alignment of each component. As best we can.

That’s not too bad. While the words are staggered, there’s enough of a grid to hold the words together visually without appearing like a hodge-podge of disparate elements. One of the elements that I really liked from the earlier workup was a cog. So let’s add one. Or two.

Not too shabby. One of the main parts of this exercise is to create a word mark that can stand on its own, but also cohabitate with our ubiquitous house. Let’s see how they pair up.

It’s okay, but the letter forms, being so blod, dominate the house completely. Maybe if we back off the boldness just a tad.

Okay, now we have something that looks like a decent fit. I realize that it may be difficult to tell the difference at this size, so you can compare the various treatments here. And let’s add the work portion of the logo to the cog we developed on our first outing.

Overall – not bad. Funny thing is, after I finished all the various tweaking and messing about, I took a look at the ‘Crazy Earl’s Logo Emporium‘ version. You know, I still don’t mind it. True, it has a lot going on. And yes, it’s got a little bit of a ‘wild west’ vibe happening (but, if you knew how things go down at The Logo Factory, that’s not entirely inaccurate). In case you’ve forgotten, here it is again:

Comparatively speaking, the Lubalin version is a bit, ahm, ‘safe’. No real ‘character’ or funky ‘style’. Seems I still can’t make up my mind. So, I’m leaving it up to you to select one. So, what’s it going to be? One cog or two? Bold or not-so-bold? Or throw caution to the wind and go with Crazy Earl and his Logo Emporium?

Alas, seems like the only way to finish this up is to absolve myself of all responsibility. Accordingly, the comment section is all yours.

Related posts:

1. Dispatches from the design trenches – reworking The Factory logo
2. Designing our logo. The Final Chapter?
3. New! Spec work. Schmeck work. Proudly announcing our groovy new design contest factory!

Back in October, we tinkered around with redesigning The Logo Factory logo (see Battle of The Logos for more). We were originally thinking about a complete overhaul: a new factory ‘house’, typography, color scheme – the works. Trouble is, and as much as I’d like to change The Logo Factory ‘house’, it’s not really practical. It’s part of our trademark registrations. It’s all over the internet. It’s been turned into a rotatable 3D version that we’ve been using on various websites for a couple of years. Since we started using it in 1995 – first as my personal ‘logo factory’ icon, and then as our corporate mark – the little house has been a part of The Logo Factory story from day one (paradoxically, the reason I want to change it is also the reason I can’t). Alas, for better or for worse, we’re stuck with it and any rework will have to be built around our ubiquitous house.

That’s not to say we can’t tinker with the treatment a little bit. Over the years, artwork for the house has become increasingly inconsistent. We used to have the strapline ‘Media Works’ but that was removed (not entirely sure why). We re-sized the logo a few years ago in illustrator, somebody forgot to constrain the scaling and, for a while, some of our style sheets and asset files consisted of skinny, anorexic houses. The logo boxes have changed several times (strangely, one version saw crates floating off into space). While the original version of The Logo Factory house was purple and teal, we lost the colors at some point. There was a reason for that at the time – the original PANTONE colors weren’t web safe (something that mattered back in modem times) and darker purples didn’t translate well on many monitors. The line weight of the artwork wasn’t consistent (a result of my illustrator background, I suppose) but a little rough around the edges for a logo. The lines weren’t hefty enough, something which had caused reproduction issues when the logo was reduced (you can notice this most on our Twitter profile icon). There were some line quality issues with the smokestacks (above left) that had been annoying me for years. If we are going to keep the house, we could at least give it a decent face lift and bring the old girl into the 21st century.

Having a go at the original vector artwork, I tweaked the old house (above left) into a more solid and linear version (above right). Nothing terribly drastic, In fact, the changes are such that most wouldn’t recognize the difference unless it was pointed out and the two versions sat side-by-each. I also spent a little time making sure that the artwork files were set up correctly in Illustrator, (below) – something which many designers neglect to do, and something that I neglected when I first created the graphic almost fifteen years ago. It’s one thing to have a logo that looks cool on on a monitor. It’s another thing to have logo files that are ready for any application (I’ve always found vinyl die-cutting to be a litmus test of any logo setup).

Once we had a decent version of our Logo Factory house – technically sound and a little more versatile than its predecessor – it was time to tackle the rest of the logo, the typography that makes up our corporate name. We were pretty well hog-tied in the design of the house, but could be a little more flexible with the accompanying text. Don’t get me wrong – changing the font portion of our logo was no less difficult a choice to make. It too has been with us for a long time. It’s gone under some minor tweaks over the years – we added a .com to one version – but otherwise The Logo Factory in Loveletter font has been with us since early 1995. Trouble is, because the house had to stay, any new corporate ‘message’ had to be defined by the typography, while the fonts had to gel visually with the icon.

Someone in the Battle of The Logos comment section referred to the original typewriter font as a ‘battered 90′s font’ and they certainly have a point. Using stressed letters back in the mid-nineties was kinda edgy (people were still enamored with pristine type found in desktop publishing software and old-fashioned typewriter fonts bordered on logo design heresy). Before I started playing around, I needed to figure out exactly what I wanted the logo to “say”. I wanted to emphasize what makes us different from the increasing number of online logo design companies playing their trade on the internet. First and foremost, we’re a real studio. Sure, we use the internet to market ourselves, but in many ways we’re decidedly low-tech. Strictly speaking, we don’t feature an automated platform or other internet gimmicks and a high-tech ‘look and feel’ might run counter to our “message” and our studio “personality”.

When you get right down to it, we’re pretty old school, a theme that’s probably worth building into the design. We still feature one-on-one interaction between an in-house designer and our clients, whether through long distance phone calls or e-mail. We also have a lot of drop-in clients- local businesses who may, or may not, have found us on the internet. I wanted a logo that spoke to hand-built design and craftsmanship (yes, I realize our name – The Logo ‘Factory’ – runs contrary to that notion, but we’re stuck with it too). Keeping all of this in mind, and If we were to pick a commercial font (something which I’ve never been opposed to, especially when our company name is 14 characters long) it had to be a little old-fashioned. Verging on retro even. I’ve always been a fan of Letterhead Fonts and their Boston Truckstyle hit the right note (above).

The trouble with the phrase “The Logo Factory” is that it’s extremely long and doesn’t work well as a horizontal design. We have to stack the words on top of each other, but that represents a visual issue that can be unpleasant. An almost perfect visual pyramid. In the word “logo” the spacing between the L & O in ‘log’ is problematic, but the ‘L’ in the Boston Truckstyle font set features a nice ornate tail that alleviates most of the issue. Looks nice too. Trouble is, there’s absolutely no way to stack this font combination without making the word ‘factory’ completely illegible.

Nuts. Using one font for all three words in our name wasn’t going to work. Had to ditch the ornate treatment of ‘Logo’ and bring in another style, keeping this in mind: any more than three fonts and your logo looks like a ransom note. After tinkering around with a few sets, I settled on Outlaw Regular, again from Letterhead Fonts, a condensed, slightly ornate letterform (which alleviated the L + O spacing issue) and worked pretty well visually with ‘The’ and ‘Factory’. The word Factory is much longer than The & Logo, so I arced it slightly to reduce the width. I wanted to balance things out a little, and the addition of a couple of stars accomplished that while adding a nifty retro feel. Hey, we’re almost there.

When pulling apart our old logo, it dawned on me that it didn’t actually say what we did. I usually think straplines are a little goofy, but I need to remember that we’re marketing to a retail audience. Maybe it was time to finally add a sub title that described what The Logo Factory actually is. I tired to be clever and tinkered around with various combinations “your logo hand-built” (a little vague and suggested some form of logo sculpture), custom logos” (redundant – they should all be custom) until finally settling on dead simple – “Design Studios”. While short on clever, it was long on explanation and addressed some of the primary goals of this mission – differentiating ourselves from the thousands of logo design companies dotting the web. I guess one of our main strengths is our experience. We’ve been around since 1996 (a lifetime in internet years) and in this era of fly-by-night logo companies setting up shop every two seconds, it’s probably something worth adding to the mix. Keeping with the old-fashioned theme, I added an “Est. 1996″ to the bottom of the text workup and reversed it out of a solid oval. As an added bonus, this oval anchored the design nicely, counteracting any visual weirdness caused by the ‘factory’ arc. Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s join up the type with the house, and see what we have. Unlike previous versions, I put the house on the right – I could tuck the house quite tightly to the text, while the overlap of the roof on the word ‘logo’ didn’t represent too much visual complexity. It also would help alleviate spacing issues that have cropped up when our current logo is used on the right side of a web header.

When I shopped the new logo around the office, it received a fairly positive response. The one suggestion was that ‘The’ was too large and overpowered the design, so I scaled it back a bit. Gotta be careful here – it’s extremely important that the word ‘The’ is part of any TLF logo because 1) THE Logo Factory is our legal name and 2) thelogofactory.com is our website. We don’t own logofactory.com (in a case of inspired stupidity I had that domain, but let it expire years ago to save the $35, and it was quickly snapped up by some embroidery outfit in Florida. They later wanted to sell it to me for an amount in the six figures). In order to downplay the size, while still making the word noticeable I placed it inside a solid background oval. That didn’t work, so I added a cog (hey, it’s a factory) but realized that half a cog looks suspiciously like a sunset, particularly when reduced.

Though I really should know better, I thought color might help tone down the sunset vibe (it didn’t) so I removed the background and scaled ‘The’ to a more appropriate size. I liked the idea of a cog (to help balance the wild-west look) and the letter ‘O’ in Factory seemed like a perfect spot to drop one in. Yep, it’s there. Look again. Funny thing too – in creating this logo, I developed a way to create a really accurate cog in about 20 seconds. Think I’ll do a little illustrator tut about it later.

It’s always advisable that if you’re going to use a complicated icon in your logo, you also have a stand alone font version (above left). We’ve always had a library of different TLF logo variants that can be utilized for specific applications, resolutions and aspect ratios (though we haven’t been as consistent as we should). Makes managing your brand assets a little bit of a chore but the versatility is always worth it in the end (asset management is not something that we’ve been particularly good at – that’s why there are so many different versions of our logo lying around and why we need to standardize everything now), I also like the fact that the font version has a square logo footprint – many social media websites feature square avatars, and it’s nice to use a version of your logo that hasn’t been cropped.

Another litmus test of a logo is how it appears on colored or black backgrounds. Many logos, especially illustrative ones, can’t simply be reversed (ie: white turned into black – that’s a negative image, similar to old black and white film’) and often, entirely new artwork has to be created. Thanks to a white keyline already built into the house (hey, I had insider knowledge), this isn’t an issue here. Is it me, or does this version look like it belongs on a Jack Daniels bottle?

What about color you say? Well, the logo is designed primarily to work in one color (as mentioned earlier, we lost the purple and teal combination years ago) but we might want to spice things up once in a while. Luckily enough, it’s not really an issue. We can even add a little blend to liven things up (color here is for visual only. It’s hideous. I know).

The thing I like about this particular font workup is that it’s versatile enough to be used as sub-brands for various offshoot projects. Think podcasts and videos (below). The built-in strapline can become the project title, while the number of a sequential item can be dropped in, as shown below. If we go with this design, we might just have the makings of a fairly robust branding tool.

If the resolution permits, I’ve also set up a version with a web address banner. Back of T-shirts, coffee mugs and anytime the logo’s large enough to warrant it. A little busy I suppose, but just enough of a carnival vibe that accurately describes what goes on at The Logo Factory on a daily basis. I set that version up as a compound object so the color can be easily changed, and the logo is bang-on technically for screenprinting, vinyl stickers and other one-color uses.

This compound version can also be used as a watermark on various backgrounds. This example isn’t particularly good – I just grabbed a screenshot of our Twitter profile background to give you an idea.

And there you have it. A proposed new ‘look’ for The Logo Factory with all the various versions and permutations, the rationale for the the change and the thinking behind the setup. Using this new version will require a complete ‘look and feel’ overhaul of anything that features our logo (which is sort of okay, we’ve a new site in planning stages now). It’s enough of a departure to be ‘new’, while still maintaining enough of the original TLF ‘flavor’ to be recognizable and integrated into our marketing material without too much fuss. It’s quite possible for both logos to exist in the same universe. One thing though – when I uploaded the images for this post, I did notice that the strapline tends to fill in, so we’re either going to remove it for some web uses, or hand edit the images when used very small (a hassle I know, but at 72 dpi, sometimes a necessity).

So what do you think? Cool? Crap? Worth while changing? I’m not entirely sold on it myself, especially after going back and reviewing our current logo thinking “hey, that’s not too bad”. The gang at the shop like it. My daughter doesn’t (she was horrified that I even considered changing the logo at all and pleaded me not to go on). The Mrs. told me she liked it, but I think I detected a vague sense of “meh”. Overall, I think we’re due a change and believe that the new logo is a slight improvement over what we’ve been using, especially when it comes to marketing our studio in a retail environment. Just enough Kitsch to rep our company vibe, but not too goofy as to be off-putting. I’d love to hear what you think – feel free to comment but please be kind. I know it doesn’t look like it, but the above represents about three very frustrating days of my life.

Update: After playing around with the logo in various formats and resolutions, I noticed a couple of minor issues. When used smallish, all the subtexts were leaning towards filling in. The Outlaw Regular font features little pointy flourishes half-way down each letter (see below), which are really nice when the fonts are large, but tend to gum up when smaller. They didn’t add anything to the design, so I took the points out by hand-editing the vector version in Illustrator. With the pointy things gone, I had to adjust the kerning slightly.

Another thing that was starting to piss me off was the swoopy flourish in ‘The’. Oh, I like the idea, but it seemed to be pinching the letters ‘H’ and ‘E’, especially when displayed at a small size. Another quick edit, pushing the top half of the ‘T’ north, gave us a little more breathing room.

I also tidied up some of the other kerning and spacing, centering objects visually rather than automatically through Illustrator’s align function. I’ve added the updated version below. You can view a full-size version of the design here.

Despite the tweaks and edits, you might think there’s much obvious difference between the two. You might think me a little barmy for the obsessive pixel pushing and you might be right. But here’s the deal. Any logo that features things that aren’t quite ‘so’ will slowly drive a designer mad. Think of tin-foil stuck in a tooth cavity and you’ll understand a little of the potential anguish. If we use this logo, there will eventually be something that I hate about it. And every time I look at it, I’ll ask myself “why didn’t I see that?”. It’s the nature of the beast, so best to get a handle on as many of these visual gremlins before it leaves this blog post.

Related posts:

1. Reworking The Logo Factory design (cont’d)
2. Designing our logo. The Final Chapter?
3. The Logo Factory logo goes 3D…