Logo Surgery Blog

Have you seen this fantastic video?

It’s by the graphic designer James Houston, and if you are in Scotland you can go and see it as part of Glasgow School of Art’s graphic design degree final show.

I remember the ZX Spectrum well, and my first ventures into graphic design as a 12 year old boy. I spent hours making pictures with big pixels of blue, red, yellow and black, and those strange colours cyan and magenta! I always wondered why Clive Sinclair in all his wisdom picked such an odd bunch of colours for his computer.

I was also intrigued to find that these same colours mysteriously existed under the flaps of cereal boxes - very bizarre. Eventually I discovered that cyan and magenta were two of the four colours used in the printing process, and that the ZX Spectrum was built anticipating the desk top publishing revolution - amazing!

I also loved the Sinclair logo - did you?

It’s so perfect!

How come I’m always the last to know! You may have noticed that Google have changed their favicon (a favicon is the little icon that displays next to the web address bar in your browser). If you remember it used to be a ‘G’ in a box, but now it’s the lower case ‘g’ from their main logo. I think the new favicon looks ok.

But here’s the news - they want help designing a new one, and have launched a competition to design one! (Actually their blog says its not a competition just some “idea sharing” or something like that.) 

If you want to have a go at this design, you need to get your skates on - the closing date is the 20th June! To help you they have kindly left a design brief on their website, I’ve pasted it below:

• Make the shape and profile visible. We’ve found that semi-transparent graphics, specifically 32-bit alpha transparency, work best.
• Incorporate some or all of the letters in “Google.”
• Utilize the primary colors that are used in the Google logo. We’ve found that monochromatic designs tend to work best with blue; yellow is too light and doesn’t provide enough contrast, and red looks like an error.
• Avoid being product specific. The favicon should apply well to many different Google products and devices (e.g., mobile, PC).
• Be timeless. The favicon shouldn’t date itself or be time-specific. Send us a design that you think will last.

That’s a pretty tight brief, especially as this has to work in a sixteen by sixteen pixel space!

If you want to have a go at designing Google’s new favicon follow the link below.

http://www.google.com/faviconideas/

Good luck!

Oh my gosh!! According to the rumours Yahoo’s logo has gone purple! Why? I’ve just checked and it’s still red - phew! It looks as if they are testing out some new branding and creating a lot of hype at the same time. Some visitors to the Yahoo home page are being greeted with the new logo then going back and it’s red. I wonder if this logo tinkering will increase visits to its web site - probably.

I quite like the old logo, and the little animations they put with it from time to time (at the moment it’s a football in Europe for the European Cup). The Yahoo type face reminds me of how a comic artist would write the word Yahoo in a speech bubble, but is that what Yahoo wants - a big shout out 1950’s comic style?

It is probably time for a make over logo wise, but the best, and cleverest thing that Yahoo could possibly try and do is own the colour purple. Lots of logos are red, but very few choose purple - (surprise surprise). If purple stuff gets so associated with Yahoo they will have achieved a master stroke in branding - I’m not sure if they’ll make it that far, or if they even want to, but I lay down a challenge, let’s have a purple Santa Claus this Christmas.

To be honest I’m not sure, but seeing as my web site ranks so low in all the search engines and I have to rely on Google AdWords for the majority of business, I thought it high time to start some SEO (search engine optimisation). Everywhere you look on the internet everybody says add a blog to your website because it increases your search engine visibility. 

The theory goes like this: 

Write about what you do on your website, stuff the posts full of keywords (words relating to your business in my case ‘logo design’ this ‘logo design’ that), and sit back and watch the traffic roll in!! I’m sure it can’t be as easy as all that but I need to climb the rankings somehow, so this is my experiment. Come back to this blog from time to time to see if it works. Also I will be posting about what’s going on in the world of logos, graphic design and branding.

Thanks for reading my first proper blog post.

Hi World,

This is my first ever post to a blog. I’ve been thinking about what to write here for days - should I try something witty? - probably bad idea, should I try and sum up the state of logo design on the internet in 2008? - would any one be interested?! I suppose I’ll start as I mean to go on, with general ramblings. Anyway here goes - My First Blog Post.