Fairly Useless…

Creating a logo is hard. There are too many choices; colors, style, fonts, etc. Sometimes a logo comes to me instantly, but most of the time it takes many revisions of refinement. Then of course the is the client, and the client has the last word period. When I was an art director for an ad agency we would sometimes try to influence the clients decision to pick our favorite out of the stack, by putting in some terrible logos. You know where this is headed, don’t you? He picked one of the bad ones because it was green and his favorite color is green. Or even worse you get a client that like two and he wants you to mix and match.

Here is an example of the evolution of a logo. First some background, the client wanted to brand her endorsement of products. She would recommend products that were safer and healthier for children. She was the “Better Choice Mom”. So obviously I needed to portray a very warm and caring logo. I think it is important to create a logo in black and white first. Even these days when full color is cheap, its better in black and white. If it doesn’t work in one color, then it isn’t a strong image. Plus it takes color out of the first steps in the process.

OK, I put color in this first one to show that the logo can be warm, but I really want the client to focus on the shape and impression of the logo. This was the initial design. Well I think it is still a good logo, but the image is not right. Yes, it is the essence of motherhood, but the child is to young. It looks like a logo for a prenatal clinic or an adoption agency.

In the next installment, I will show were the logo goes from here.

One of these days I going to find time to learn CSS. The best way to learn is to have a real project and a deadline. Here is a great tutorial from Veerle on making a css layout from scratch.

CSS Tutorial

P.S. She has great tutorials on illustration too.

Just in time for Halloween.

Great mashup of my favorites… “Art, Movies, and Flash”.

My time was forty minutes. I stayed up too late solving this puzzle. The artwork reminds me of Bosch which we studied in high school humanities.

M&M’S® Dark Chocolate “Find the Dark Movies Game”

Have you seen popurls yet? Go check it out. It collects all the feeds in one place, kinda like Google News, but for other sites. I really liked when I first saw it. It has started to spawn other sites that have found their niche. I am partial to the design aggregators.

• http://www.macscour.com
• http://www.dontmeetyourheroes.com
• http://www.originalsignal.com/

We have been making a few short weekend car trips with the kids lately. So I put together a few PocketMods for them. I have the standard sodoku, tic-tac-toe, and capture the squares games. I usually make booklets full of each game. I made some new ones last night. Battleship, you know the one, using paper grids. The other one is called Circuits, be the first to complete the circuit by connecting your dots to make a path.

Download here

Ontoinfo has listed a collection of web design “element” trends. I add “element”, because the article is really about tabs and treatments, not overall design. They are more like accessories to complement the design, than style. Still, its a nice collection of popular trends.

ontoinfo » Current Trends In Web Design

I just uploaded two new PocketMods for car maintenance, add them to a booklet, print it out and keep ithe glove box of your car.

• Automotive Maintenance Schedule
• Automotive Maintenance Log

Download them here

Vitamin is a resource for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs. Full of great articles, such as…

This first thing I did when I got my bluetooth phone was to start uploading ringtones and images.

Here is the Kill Bill wallpaper for my Motorola V551 that I use with my ringtones that I made from the soundtrack. I used Audacity to convert the CD track to an mp3 for the phone. Here are the two audio files that I use.

• Ironside.mp3
• Banister.mp3

Is this considered fair-use?

From the makers of the old Church Sign Generator come the Official Seal Generator.