Vote on My Logo

May 14, 2004 9:57 PM

I'm trying to make a logo. It might be for a design company (tho if I can't design a logo I don't see how I could reasonably expect to make money designing), or maybe it'll be for a blog, perhaps I'll put it on cards — the end use doesn't matter, I've decided having a personal logo is cool. MeFi designers, please vote and critique the three images [inside]

A:

B:

C:


Make that vote for. The color choices are not final. Also, to those using IE, the images are png, I don't have a background color chosen and I hate white jaggies, therefore it ought to be transparant outside, not light-blue.

Thanks all.

posted by Grod to Media & Arts (34 answers total)

My vote's for the third one. It's nice you can recognize the G, without it being overt. I feel like I would like it much more if it was square, though.

The first one is kind of pretty (the colors at least) but doesn't seem to make much sense. It's just a squiggle.

Not a fan of B at all. Simplicity is key. Can you reduce your logo recognizably to just black and white? To icon size? That, and the upside-down G feels a little hokey.
posted by rafter at 10:12 PM on May 14, 2004

Agreed. C.

Simple, looks iconic - very nice.
posted by Ryvar at 10:17 PM on May 14, 2004

The third feels the most harmonious, inevitable and organic. The first is too simple and the second is too fussy in comparison, even though they're attractive enough on their own. Yeah, I really, really like the third one.
posted by maudlin at 10:26 PM on May 14, 2004

C.

I Agree with the above reasons and

A. just looks like a "less than" symbol.

B. is too complex, although it might work without the bottom diamond shape.

C. seems kinda art-nouveau, it would make a good foundry mark or personal logo/chop.
posted by milovoo at 10:34 PM on May 14, 2004

Yep, C. No high-falutin' reasons, just like it.
posted by LittleMissCranky at 10:38 PM on May 14, 2004

I like C best, too, but:

the end use doesn't matter

now I am not a designer (IANAD), but shouldn't a logo try to communicate something? Even if that's only a feeling, emotion, or abstract concept? I'd think having a solid objective in mind could only help in designing a logo.
posted by Vidiot at 10:42 PM on May 14, 2004

C wins. I agree that it conjures up art-nouveau feelings.
posted by furiousthought at 10:47 PM on May 14, 2004

Yeah, I agree. Problem is, I've had this fantasy since junior high that I'd make it as a designer some day. I never put a portfolio together (despite teachers begging me to) and never applied to art school. I'm working on a degree in English with a possible minor in analytical philosophy. So, originally I planned to use this as a logo for a design house, Grodworks, but got discouraged. Working on the logo, my discouragement increased as I realized "if I can't make something as simple as a logo when there is no client to satisfy, no deadline, no critic but myself how am I to make a living - or even money - in such a field that is oversaturated with talent?" So now I'm not certain.
--- - - - ---
posted by Grod at 10:51 PM on May 14, 2004

Grod, yes, like that -- I'd be interest in seeing what would happen if you grabbed the middle vertex (inside of the G) and dragged it down and to the right just a bit, maybe making the horizontals a little thicker.

But then again, now that I look at at the squarified version, I'm beginning to think your original might be better in any case.
posted by rafter at 11:04 PM on May 14, 2004

my personal rules for logo design, make it look good at .5 inches across in black & white, on paper, and then keep going.

grodworks, makes me think tools, geers, bolts, levers. The nice curves of the G may go nicely with some industrial-hard-edged flourish.

if I can't make something as simple as a logo when there is no client to satisfy, no deadline, no critic but myself how am I to make a living - or even money - in such a field that is oversaturated with talent?" So now I'm not certain.

you are always your own hardest client.

as far as making a living goes...it takes an interesting, ever shifting mix of passion, talent and sheer determination to make it as a designer. And clients who want decent work.

and the market [where i live] is more saturated with people willing to work than it is with Talent...i know talented people who struggle....sometimes i even feel like i'm one. I know total idiots who think they can design that are quite successfull. So Who Knows. Spin that wheel of fortune...
posted by th3ph17 at 2:45 AM on May 15, 2004

I learned just yesterday that the cardinal rule is to design in black and white, then add color. Man, life is so interesting.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 3:28 AM on May 15, 2004

B is too complicated. As for C - until others pointed it out, I hadn't even realized that it was supposed to be the letter "G". I like A - it's simple, clean.
posted by davidmsc at 4:43 AM on May 15, 2004

Grod: If you don't use A, can I have it please? Thank you.
posted by mischief at 4:43 AM on May 15, 2004

"A" seems too simple to me, and "B" looks too much like something you'd see on the costume of a Japanese animation superhero.

"C" is good though.
posted by troutfishing at 5:53 AM on May 15, 2004

C. But I think the central horizontal stroke should be slightly thicker/
posted by bonaldi at 6:56 AM on May 15, 2004

E.B. Well, that explains why everyone is voting for C. It started as a napkin doodle in b&w.

mischief, I'm sorry. I don't generally give away my art work and I don't think I should change that policy for design work. Besides, A is part of my personal iconography. It has significance to me beyond what is apparant. No one ever said to Gauguin, "if you don't use that little fox creature, can I have it?" not that I'm Gauguin, but I hope you get what I'm saying. It's nothing personal, just good policy.
posted by Grod at 10:45 AM on May 15, 2004

Or, you know, mischief could just draw his own squiggly-arrow thing.
posted by reklaw at 11:57 AM on May 15, 2004

True, reklaw. It does look a like a chevron, a squiggly arrow, or a < sign. I did spend a lot of time achieving what I find to be an aesthetically pleasing balance between thick and thin, curved and straight, closed and open.
So, while it does look like a squiggly line, and may be insignificant to those with more experience/skill/talent, it is a shape that matters to me and remains part of my set of meaningful symbols. I have no objection to mischief taking inspiration from it, I simply don't want it to be copied as is.
posted by Grod at 12:27 PM on May 15, 2004

Get rid of the keylines (outlines) on the first two & fatten up the linework on C. The varying widths in C don't look right...less variation.

Produce 4 versions of the final choice: web (#xxxxxx), print spot colour (a Pantone spec), print 4-colour (CMYK spec) & black & make available in .png, .gif, .tif & .eps as appropriate.

If you really want to pursue this as any kind of career do a good course in graphic design. Try to learn about the reproduction process with print design as it will help no end with your design origination.

[Speaking as a graphic designer & sometime GD teacher]
posted by i_cola at 12:49 PM on May 15, 2004

if I can't make something as simple as a logo
In my opinion and experience logos are not at all simple.
posted by FidelDonson at 1:12 PM on May 15, 2004

I also vote for C, if only because it's the only one that's evolved. A is meaningless to an outsider, and B is just plain awful. (On preview: what i_cola said. Those randomly colored outlines and competing line weights influenced the opinions I've expressed here and at the end of this novel. Also, never use "pen strokes" to create shapes or outlines of shapes. "Pen strokes" or outlines of vector graphics never translate properly when you "go to press". Use pure shapes and curves.)

I am a designer. Or ex-designer, more or less. I first started doing graphic design in my Dad's print shop in my pre-teen years. This mostly involved manual typographic layouts (letraset and letrapress, not hot or cold type or anything so mechanical) and graphic arts darkroom work. Camera, contact frame and film. Reverse outs and traps. Color separation. Keyline. Etc.

This is a few years before computers that were capable of doing "desktop publishing" were even remotely affordable.

Sure, the desktop publishing revolution made it possible for everyone to be a designer or publisher, but did it bother to educate these self-publishers in the process? Of course not.

I've stopped - willfully - getting upset at craptacular design work. 40 different fonts on a page, hideous typographic kerning and layouts, indecipherable logos, bad color separations. I could rant about bad design all day.

There was once a day and an era where any competent tradesperson could make a decent living at doing graphic design, layout, typography. A $500 art fee for a few words laid out with a logo? An extra $1000 for a new logo design? No problem.

Now I'm lucky if I can get 50 bucks from a client for a design that will take a week or more of research and a dozen or so solid hours of actual designwork, not even including all the time just spent intensely pondering. I gave up trying to make any sort of living and applied my knowledge of general computing to do tech support and various IT work.

(I realized that almost every time I started doing in-house design work at a new company I'd spend the first week or month fine-tuning their computers and network to be more productive and stable. Nothing like a craptastic work environment to screw up the creative flow.)

What you're looking at here is logotype design, and is indeed an arcane science even more than it is an art in the aesthetic sense.

Like all graphic design, logotypes need to communicate something. A concept, a message, an ideology, a feeling or an emotion.

To begin learning design, learn about visual center, the Golden Ratio, whitespace, and much more. Find a competent school, or read the trade journals. Don't just go to some two-bit technical school that merely teaches the mechanics of design but none of the theory, art, or craft behind design.

Learn about symbology.

The first thing I do when I'm designing an entirely new logotype for a company (or person) is interview them. I ask questions about the business, what it does, who their clients are, what kind of markets they're in and at what scale they operate at. What industry? What product? What kind of customer and client do they normally seek? What is the image they want to present?

So much research and abstract thought goes into a successful logotype design. Usually. Sometimes the designer is left with free reign to work with the marketing department and wholly invent a new image for a new company or product.

Sometimes the design process is entirely abstract horseshit that means nothing at all. These usually fail, and it seems the companies that use them fail with them.

A lot of these things aren't taught in any art or design school, except for the cream of the crop. The "Art Center College of Design" is a world-famous example of the cream of the crop. Good luck getting in there, though. :) (And yeah, whether or not Art Center is actually "cream of the crop" is certainly debatable.)

Designing logotypes is usually - again - an arcane science and black art of sorts. What you're looking to do is to gather a multitude of threads together to distill into a single (usually) black and white line-art image that is reproducible in any size from business card to billboards, and in any medium from etched woods and metals to faxes and photocopies.

In the process of logotype, you think about thousands of things. History, art, science, technology, abstract concepts, emotions, feelings, expressions. The history of the company or industry in question. The perceived (and sometimes willed) future of said company or industry. The existing designs that have similar symbolic morphologies.

And yeah, it is generally a steaming load of horseshit all around. Not entirely unlike philosophy, as lovely and scintillating as that is.

A good designer is a walking encyclopedia of both worldly (and wordly) knowledge and visual knowledge. Really good designers tend to be astounding trivia experts. A good designer will often have libraries of old books, magazines, and loose-leaf papers containing all kinds of visual and non-visual information for reference and inspirational purposes. (There's nothing new under the sun, really.)

Research and compare existing corporate logotypes. Look at AT&T and IBM's logos. How long have those been in use? Decades. Both AT&T and IBM convey a feeling of technology through linework. AT&T's logo uses lines not unlike a cathode ray tube to represent an idealized sphere as a globe to convey both technology and global scope. IBM uses similar linework to convey rasterized letters, or perhaps even an arcane lineprinter.

Now look at Cingular's stick-man logo. It succeeds in conveying connections between disparate things, and implies these things are people through the overall metatheme of a person. Though, it fails miserably at being timeless. Would a company (or that name, for that matter) with that logo have been taken seriously in the 80s or early 90s? Will that logo still be usable and current in 5 years? 10? Probably not. But it probably won't matter, as the company is fairly likely to be bought, reorganized, or renamed in that time frame.

So, anyways.

I'm going to be brutally honest, Grod. As far as I can see from these three rough examples, I'd recommend against pursuing your fantasy of being a designer, and not just because of the skill level represented here.

Am I a good designer? I'm barely passable, and I've worked on a very small handful of projects for globally known companies, and a much larger handful of complete unknowns. On a scale of 1 to 10 I'm at about 3 to maybe a 6, and I'm probably being too generous to myself.

Looking at these I'm going to have to place your current skills at somewhere between 0 and 1. I know, "ouch". Get used to it, 'cause it always hurts and going pro you'll only get more rejections.

If you take away anything, remember this: The single most difficult thing to learn as a designer is to be able to emotionally distance and extract yourself from the project at hand.

Don't tell me about personally meaningful symbologies. You can't *talk* about design within a design. You have to show me. You can't explain to your client what something *should* mean, and then expect your client to spend their valuable time explaining it to their customers. You *must* show them. All the communication should be self-contained in the design itself.

Sure, it's a labor of love if you're doing it right, but if you're emotionally involved with it how are you going to react when the Art Director or client says "No, this is all wrong. It's total crap. What the hell are you smoking, or not smoking? Start over, and have it done by tomorrow!"? This happens more often than not, and is pretty standard operations.

Sure, you can learn and practice. And even grow. If it doesn't come naturally, you're going to spend a lot of time struggling and competing with people that it comes very naturally to. Competing with people that live and breath this stuff, people that couldn't live without it as though it were air to them. People that have been breathing design instinctively since before they were even in junior high.

Design is not anywhere near as glamorous as you might think. It's extremely stressful, competitive and becoming even less lucrative with every passing moment. There isn't really any fame or fortune to be had in this career. Can anyone name a famous - and living - graphic designer off the top of their heads? (How about anyone that's not a designer?) It's usually a thankless job that involves a great deal of dealing with clueless people. Like marketers and company CEO's and other pointy-haired type people.

That being said, it can be a lot of fun and intellectually rewarding if you're willing to put in the time and effort.

And in case anyone is wondering, I'm available for the right projects *or* the right price. My science is tight. For the right projects I'd consider doing free design work or consultation for. (Think social programs, community programs, arts programs, music projects, more.) And despite the "right price" comment, there's tons of stuff I won't touch with a 20 foot pole at any price. I like being able to sleep.
posted by loquacious at 1:14 PM on May 15, 2004

For the right projects I'd consider doing free design work or consultation for. (Think social programs, community programs, arts programs, music projects, more.) And despite the "right price" comment, there's tons of stuff I won't touch with a 20 foot pole at any price. I like being able to sleep.

amen. working for a non-profit is my dream job.
posted by th3ph17 at 1:37 PM on May 15, 2004

loquacious: Looking at these I'm going to have to place your current skills at somewhere between 0 and 1. I know, "ouch". Get used to it, 'cause it always hurts and going pro you'll only get more rejections.

Current skills don't necessarily constrain future potential. In many cases, with the right cascade of instruction, it is possible to rebuild your foundations.

Grod, try reading this book.
posted by Gyan at 1:43 PM on May 15, 2004

Get rid of the keylines (outlines) on the first two & fatten up the linework on C. The varying widths in C don't look right...less variation.

I'm not sure I agree with that, exactly, but I do think C could use some tweaking. You might also try playing with the sharpness/roundness of the corners (not all of them! maybe just one or two), the proportions of the image, or even adding extra vertical lines for a more calligraphic look. You should close the book of these logos for a couple of days, go look at something else for a while, and come back to it...

(previews loquacious' post)

Well, there's another angle. I'll ignore the part about getting smacked around for 50 bucks a design. That's a whole other kettle of fish about the business side of design work. But there are lots of good points there: namely that, as a professional designer, you are going to have to distance yourself from your work and see to it that the meaning of your design is apparent at a moment's glance. Personal symbology does not have a place in the work of a graphic mercenary (tho it's fine for personal work and fine art, though again, even there you want to communicate something to your audience). You will have to deal with client rejection, and furthermore, that client will frequently be wrong.

I think you should keep practicing, and do things for other people whenever you have the opportunity.

And you're in school? Screw graphic design, take a life drawing class!
posted by furiousthought at 2:00 PM on May 15, 2004

True, reklaw. It does look a like a chevron, a squiggly arrow, or a greater than sign. I did spend a lot of time achieving what I find to be an aesthetically pleasing balance between thick and thin, curved and straight, closed and open.

It also looks quite a bit like "ku" written in Japanese.
posted by vorfeed at 2:17 PM on May 15, 2004

Interesting. I don't take the criticism personally, loquacious (most descriptive user name ever, btw), and appreciate you taking the time to actually think about my question seriously.
I intend to take some courses, one of these days, when I can.

furiousthought, I've taken life drawing. Took it in high school, took it in college. Naturalism is not a problem for me. The meaningful abstraction that is design is what interests and challenges me. If I am a 0 as a designer I'm about a 6 as a draftsman. But so what, that's a technical skill anyone can learn, at its most mundane its just the mechanical reproduction of what the eye sees, at its most exhilarating it it takes on new meaning through quality of line, exaggeration, intentional omissions, direction, overall energy, and all that other stuff. I can hold my own but I don't have any passionate desire to create fine art.

loquaciousDoes it sting to have three examples of my efforts called a zero, sure, a little. Am I going to take it personally, no. I'll take it in the spirit (I presume) it was meant.
Do I seriously expect to make money doing design, no. Even if I were genuinely talented, the horror stories I've heard, and the old timers longing for the good ol' days--I don't want the stress.

Besides, I'm 23, more or less a kid, I've been in the real world a bit longer than some of my peers, had a few more traumatic experiences, but still, I've got a lot of learning to do. Why would I be offended by a comment that appears to take an honest interest in helping me on that path?

i_cola, thanks for pointing out the weight differences in the strokes. I've tightened that up.

Whoever it was who said don't use pen strokes use outlines. These were all done with outlines, no penstrokes.
posted by Grod at 4:02 PM on May 15, 2004

I was looking for more info on the black and white then add color ideas as I have heard Roger Black speak on this and I thought it might be in one of his interviews, and I found this article, which is also interesting.
posted by milovoo at 4:31 PM on May 15, 2004

Grod: Yeah, the criticism is meant to be helpful, not destructive. People tend to get more than a little touchy when they ask for critique. I find that it is exceedingly rare for people to ask for honest criticism; generally it means "Please tell me my stuff is good!" which is just unfluffy.

I was the one talking about penstrokes and outlines. As someone who eschews Adobe Illustrator for CorelDraw when it comes to vector work and logotype stuff, I think we're having a lingo breakdown. I honestly don't touch Illustrator any more, so my language for that is a bit rusty. (I'll explain why I prefer CorelDraw at the end.)

The thing I'm saying "don't do that" about is whatever function that you're using that merely overlays the path of the actual Bezier curve of the vector graphic in question with a specific weight and color outline.

Here's why: these "outlines" aren't dimensionally accurate or scalable. When you do one of these pen-based outlines around the edge of the vector, whatever the thickness of that line is reduces the visible volume of that filled vector object by half of that thickness. (Unless you're using a "put outline behind object fill" function, and even then it's a bad idea for almost all projects.)

Lets say you have a set of complex curves making up a graphic. Now, you've got to take that graphic and make it useable to whatever output path you'll end up using. If you're doing *everything* at home - be it web jpegs, business card prints, whatever - you'll run into less trouble.

But the second you hand it off to a client or printer or output house, you no longer have control of it, and you *really* don't want to have your client come back and bill you for the service fee for artwork that the print or output house billed your client with. The prices these print/output houses charge for art time are staggering sometimes. You can easily end up paying your client for the honor of working for them.

There are thousands of rendering engines and devices out there, and almost all of them handle these vector functions and objects differently. A printer may need to use raw vector data to trap, overprint, underprint, or bleed the dimensions of the vector to properly register on the press. If your discrete/index color seps rely on the outline/penstrokes and your "output path" needs to trap, bleed and under/overprint, you're going to run into trouble and fast. You can't do these things to outlines, because they aren't vector objects themselves. They're only a treatment on top of a vector path. You see what I'm getting at yet?

Think of it this way. Every discrete "color" in a design needs to be created and remain as a discrete vector "object" from the start. Even actual keylines need to be discrete vector objects, not outlines or pen weights, and as a keyline they'll have an unbroken path for the outside of the object and unbroken sub-path(s) for the "holes" in the keyline where your "colors" are trapped.

Also, when you use these outlines or pen weights as part of the initial design, you'll run into major problems during the design process. Try scaling the object up or down. The pen weight normally stays what it was set at at the initial scale. So if you have a 10" vector image with a 0.5" outline, and you scale that 10" design down to 1" to incorporate it in an additional design - say an ad layout featuring a graphic of a product with the logo embedded in the corner somewhere, you'll end up with mostly outline on that graphic and no object fill showing through.

So, train yourself now to totally ignore the pen/outline functions entirely. Train yourself to zero out the outlines most vector design programs automatically include on things like fonts, clipart, and coarse objects. If your vector program allows you to set and save the global default outline to "none", do it. You'll thank me later.

How do you create a new keyline off of the object(s) you're working with? In CorelDraw this is the "contour" function where it traces the actual vector path with an offset of a given dimension. You break the resulting combined group of vectors apart and then "knock out" the "holes" in the keyline object by using the original components you've just contoured as cutting tools. In CorelDraw, this would mean using the "trim" or "combine" functions, depending if you wanted to leave the original curve or simply integrate it as a subpath - or hole - in the keyline. In Illustrator, you'd use the "Pathfinder" functions.

And this is why - at least for modern logotype design and most typography and related logo work - you want to train yourself to think purely in black and white. To be more accurate, you want to train yourself to not think in color at all, but in space/notspace. Or "inside the path" and "outside the path". Think in terms of topologies, not colors.

And the preceding two paragraphs will lead nicely into why I use Corel.

It's all about work flow. Illustrator is a fine program, but is burdened with too many bells and whistles and some sort of closeted yearning to not be a vector design program anymore. It's been yearning to be Fractal Design's Painter for years now.

Wonderful, I can take a leaf-shaped vector and make it a paintbrush. Cool, I can take that paintbrush and spraypaint a bunch of leaves all over my layout in a random fashion and save myself the work of copying and pasting 300 individual leaves and rotating and arranging each one. Neat-o, I can take a simple curve and jazz it up with a bunch of machine-created tweakings and bendings that would have taken me months to do manually.

But where's the workflow? How does that make creating a new, complex vector object from scratch any easier? These toys are all fine and good for doing creative layouts, but where's the actual design tools?

For me - for creating logowork and new curve and shapework - CorelDraw is far superior. The context aware menus are superb. The curve editing functions are *always* at the very surface, and always available by customizable hotkey. Corel not only has the standard shape tools - line, curve, square, and ellipse - but it also includes a polygon tool (with globally adjustable vertices and side-counts!), a spiral tool(logarithmic or normal!), and a grid tool. These are massive timesavers. The ellipse tool's objects can be edited into pie slices. The square tool's objects allow interactive corner-radius adjustments.

CorelDraw makes logotype building damn near intuitive and much easier than Illustrator. The last time I checked, Illustrator didn't even have a docker or toolbar for the Pathfinder functions. Each pathfinder function required either a mouse-menu navigation or the keyboard combo for that menu. (alt+MenuLetter+PathfinderSubmenuLetter+PathfinderFunctionLetter)

Screw that. On building a complex shape with simple shapes, that would add *thousands* of keystrokes to a workflow set that only contains a hundred or so at the most, when you know what you're doing. Usually much less. (Example: I could recreate the IBM logo *exactly* in less than 30-50 steps in CorelDraw. I could probably figure out how to do it in less than 20. And I wouldn't even have to use a typographic font at all. I could build it all out of simple polygons very easily.)

This is also one of the reasons I find a lot of designers using Macromedia FlashMX for developing vector objects. Workflow.

So, for me logowork and almost all vector work that isn't "illustrative" in nature, CorelDraw is the only choice. All I need for digital logotype work is simple objects, Bezier curve editing, object-to-object editing functions to make complex shapes with simple shapes, and the contour tool. Maybe the blend tool and a few other things I'm probably forgetting. :)

And yeah, we could argue about the quality of the curves of Corel vs. Illustrator for *days*. We could argue about color matching. We could argue about features and functions. You could try to argue something stupid like professionals will *only* use Illustrator or Quark, completely oblivious to the fact that the bulk of the "design" work you'll see on a day to day basis was actually created in Corel. (Think phone book ads and junkmail! Corel is everywhere!)

We could even argue about precision, but if you'd side with Illustrator on that, you'll lose. Corel can handle documents that are *miles* wide at an inch scale to 5 decimal places of precision. I've personally created documents that contained millions of Bezier nodes, millions of paths, and hundreds of thousands of subpaths. I make some really complex stuff for fun.

And thanks regarding the username. I think. :) It was given to me, and is certainly apt. Despite my talkativeness, I know how (and when) to be silent, and I even enjoy it. Just don't get me riled up about something if you're in a hurry to go somewhere, 'cause I'll chew off both your ears and even start gnawing off your legs. ;)
posted by loquacious at 5:46 PM on May 15, 2004

Ah, I just realized what you mean. You're refering to where in Illustrator, one selects the outline color and weight, correct? I'll remember that, thanks.
posted by Grod at 6:27 PM on May 15, 2004

Exactly.
posted by loquacious at 11:56 PM on May 15, 2004

loquacious: Illustrator has had the Pathfinder functions in a palette since at least version 9.0 (what I use). Just FYI.
posted by Ptrin at 2:08 PM on May 16, 2004