27/06/2008 - susana

Should we use a symbol or a wordmark for our logo?

When we face the challenge of designing an enterprise or product corporate image there are many things to take into account, one of them is the fact of how to represent their interest, through a symbol, or through a wordmark.

A Symbol is an image, object, picture or any concrete representation of an idea. It doesn’t contain any kind of typography. A wordmark, on the contrary, is the “written part” of a brand’s logo, the typography with it’s unique special treatment. Here’s an example of Firefox’s logo, with a symbol on the left and a wordmark on the right.

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27/06/2008 - susana

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Free Icons for World of Warcraft fans!

Are you a fan of MMORPG? Do you love playing World of Warcraft? Here’s your chance yo style up your desktop and applications with some great looking WoW icons Sygma Style.

You can download this set of free icons at Iconshock’s Free Download page and you’ll get 5 icons on ICO, ICNS and PNG file formats with a frontal view of five different races of the most popular WoW characters, such as a human, a dwarf and an orc.

27/06/2008 - susana

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Is icon perspective important?

Looking around the I Started Something Blog, I found out that Windows Vista Icons were facing the wrong direction. I used Vista for a couple of weeks and never noticed it, but when we compare them with icons from Windows XP, we can tell the difference.

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26/06/2008 - susana

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Egypt themed icons and vector source files

For members of its community, Iconshock released a new set of Lumina icons inspired on the Egyptian theme. Additionally, vector source files are also available for free download, that way you can customize your icons the way you want! By downloading this set you’ll get a Nefertiti’s icon like the one in the left, a momie, an Egyptian cross a pyramid and Anubis, the god of death.

Remember these icons are for free download but you need to join Iconshock’s community first. Once you join you will not only be able to download this beautiful set of icons but you can also swap it to other sets you like!

26/06/2008 - susana

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About London’s 2012 Olympics Logo

The Olympic Organising Committee hired the design agency Wolff Olins and payed them £400.000 in order for them to create a Logo for the 2012 Olympics that should be held in London. The result was a logo that nobody liked and didn’t seem to have much logic. A group of people decided to do something about it and protest in a very unique way. They held a contest where anyone could upload their own logo and cast a vote in order to pick the best one, print it and protest.

Logo Created by the Wolff Olins Agency for the 2012 Olympics

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25/06/2008 - susana

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Tarzan Icons Lumina Style

Lumina Style Icons are icons with final plastic finish and shine. Tarzan’s icon sets is composed by 5 different icons, featuring the main characters of this famous movie: Tarzan, Jane, Clayton, Tantor and Terk.

These icons are available for free download at iconshock’s website. The package contains ICO and ICNS files (for Windows and for Mac) and PNG files, which look great in sizes from 16×16 to 256×256 and have transparency.

You can use these icons for your entertainment applications, and to customize your desktop with nicer icons!

25/06/2008 - susana

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Logos for promoting countries

A logotype is a graphic design element, representing an organization or product. In order to promote themselves, countries also developed a logo.

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24/06/2008 - susana

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Logos created through mathematical operations

Logólogos is an Argentinean blog where we can find how enterprises logos can be created by taking or adding parts of other logos or popular images. Some of them are very funny, others a little bit complicated to understand, but I’m sure you’ll have a nice time looking at the mathematical operations.

Each week they also publish an equation for us to solve, here’s this week enigma which I personally haven’t discovered yet.

Edit: It was Michelin.. It wasn’t that complicated and yet, I couldn’t guess

23/06/2008 - susana

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The best logos according the European Design

Earlier this year, European Design Awards took place in order to stress the talent of European designers and agencies. Two of the categories gave awards to logo related design: Brand Logo and Company Logo.

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23/06/2008 - susana

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Button Generator for beginners

Some of you might be familiar with all types of design software, still, when you are not quite sure of how to create nice buttons for your application, or don’t have the skills to use a professional design software, you can find online some applications such as As Button Generator who can do the job for you.

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20/06/2008 - susana

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Start swapping free icons at iconshock.com

Iconshock.com has developed a Community where every week free icons are given. You can swap your icons to other users in order to expand your collection. We invite you to register and start taking advantage of the fabulous icons. This week, Vista style icons with the Japan and Sailing themes we’re launched. Here are some previews:

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20/06/2008 - susana

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What’s a favicon and how to create one for your website

A favicon (favorite icon) is the icon that browsers display next to a webpage’s URL. This is fully customizable and it is used in order to represent the image of a site, and create remembrance of it among the visitors. Some favicons are quite popular, others just don’t work as well. Take a look at the picture below; I’m sure you can recognize a couple of the icons there.

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20/06/2008 - susana

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About Apple’s MobileMe new logo

MobileMe is a new service Apple is offering in order to keep your PC, Mac, ipod and iphone synchronized. Mac is known for having great clean designs but with MobileMe it just didn’t happened. When you see the logo you don’t find anything that makes you think about Apple besides the iphone icons.

The first thing we notice about the logo is the name. It’s not that bad but it’s not good enough; perhaps they should have stick to the prefix i, at least that kept some kind of unity between all products. Besides, the Me suffix reminds us of WindowsMe, and associate a name of one of your products to your main contender can’t be right. Apple’s designer team could have done better, this time, it just wasn’t good enough.

Seen on: Wisdump

19/06/2008 - susana

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Create High Quality Pictures using High Dynamic Range Rendering (HDRR)

Haven’t you noticed that there are some times, when you take a picture, there is no way you can make the illumination be right? If your background looks fine, your foreground doesn’t and viceversa . This happens because cameras can’t reproduce scenes with high contrast the way our eyes can perceive them.The dynamic range is the measurable difference between the brightest highlight and the darkest value. This range is quite limited in sensors, that’s why when we take a picture we must decide which exposure level to use, depending if we want to preserve the highlights or the shadows. In order to get a high quality picture, several techniques can be applied, one of them is HDRR , which stands for High Dynamic Range Rendering. This is how the rendering of computer graphics by using lighting calculations in a wider dynamic range is called. This technique imitates the human eye which adapts to all the different luminosities of a same scene by opening and closing the pupil while all the information gets together. For this reason, we can see zones with different illumination that photographic cameras can’t show.

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19/06/2008 - susana

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5 things you need to know in order to create a professional logo

We’ve seen a lot of logos around, some of them better than the others. At JustCreativeDesign.com, 5 steps for achieving professional results were given to us. Here they are:

1. Learn what a logo is and what it represents

In order to create a good logo we need to know what it is. Sometimes we might confuse a logo with a mark, but it’s more than that, a logo is a way to represent through shapes, colors, fonts and images a business commercial brand.

2. Know The Rules & Principles Of Logo Design

A good logo must be describable, memorable, effective without color and scalable. If you can describe it you can remember it. It has to work without color and it has to work in every single size.

3. Learn from others

Too many logos have been created, some successful, some not. What’s important is to learn from all of them. In order to know why they work or why they don’t, we could go back to step number two and realize how Nike’s logo follows all the necessary rules for successful logo design and the others just don’t.

4. Establish your own logo design process

A logo design process basically needs to follow the following steps.

The Design Brief
Research and Brainstorming
Sketching
Prototyping and Conceptualising (See Step 5)
Send to Client for Review
Revise and Add Finishing Touches
Supply Files to Client and Provide Customer Service

5. Learn the software and complete the logo

Be sure you know the software you’re working on in order to get professional results. Follow the design process (Step 4) and get it done.

You can see the whole original article here.

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Archive for June, 2008