BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Everyone knows how important a logo is to your identity and brand. Every business, online and offline, requires a logo. A logo represents your company and products to potential customers.

Almost any designer can create a good logo, but it won’t necessarily be perfect. Creating an extraordinary logo requires a thorough design process. It should involve brainstorming ideas (either on paper or in digital format), incorporating standard logo elements, choosing appropriate typography, using colors correctly and—most importantly—making a few versions of the proposed logo in different fonts, colors and styles. Points of comparison will help you see which one is perfect.

In this post, we’ve compiled a list of businesses that have shared a peek inside their fascinating logo design process with the public. We hope it will get you started on your own.

The Logo Design And Development Process

The Bounty Bev Logo Design Process
“A bounty is a reward given to those who seek the best, and BountyBev brings you the reward of American Craft Beer. Our brands are steeped in history, tradition, and countless stories that should be shared with those who are worthy and paired with flavorful foods.�

Grooveshark | Case study
“Grooveshark is an international peer-to-peer music platform, built behind a social network online. Its users are able to stream their own composed full-length songs, build playlists, share music and make friends—all for free.”

Logo Design Process: Homespun Chili
“Homespun Chili uses local and international ingredients to create one-of-a-kind meat and vegetarian chili creations. The Logo was supposed to be clean, smart, quirky, mainstream with a little Martha Stewart!â€�

Siah Design Rebrand Process
The Siah Design logo shows a hand with index finger showing direction with the bottom part of the hand being the pencil. The icon suggests giving direction to creativity. The significance of the finger pointing up is that it is pointing up to God giving Him any credit for his design work. Being a Christian creative director Josiah Jost is very open about his faith. Siah Design specializes in logo design, has won various awards for its work and has been published in multiple design books. Siah Design serves a local, national and international clientele.

Artistic Expression: Logo Design From Start to Finish
Vero offers restaurants, cafés and hotels an eco-friendly bottled water alternative. The company uses the latest in microprocessor-controlled water-purification technology to purify, chill and (if needed) carbonate tap water at the point of use.

Dache.ch Logo Design Process
Dache is the portfolio of David Pache, where he also describes his self-branding. He’s a creative consultant and brand and identity designer in Switzerland who works with clients all over the globe to design logos, websites and more.

The Logo Development Process: New England Breeze Case Study
New England Breeze sells and installs wind turbines and solar panels for commercial and residential customers.

Step by Step Logo Design Project
The idea behind myNiteLife is to provide an online organizer and planner for nightlife in the city of Sheffield, where bars, restaurants and clubs, among other venues, are listed, along with user reviews and ratings.

Logo Design Process and Walkthrough for Vivid Ways
Vivid Ways is a new blog that focuses on personal development and colorful living. It aims to inspire and encourage readers by offering ideas and tips on how to live an amazing life.

Giacom Brand Identity Design
Giacom is a leading provider of Internet services in the private and public sectors of the UK, Europe and beyond. Giacom’s portfolio includes scalable Internet hosting and outsourced message filtering and archiving systems.

Henri Ehrhart Brand Identity Design
Henri Ehrhart is a French wine producer in the Alsace region. The company, in operation for more than 50 years, focuses on standard and medium-range wines distributed mainly in supermarkets. It sold 4.5 million bottles in 2008.

VISSUMO Brand Identity Design
VISSUMO is a provider of next-generation touch technologies for industrial, architectural, retail, transportation, instructional and entertainment applications. The company has recently undergone a name change, from Infini Touch to VISSUMO, and this designer’s task was to create the new brand identity and stationery.

Ecometrica Brand Identity Design
Ecometrica is a provider of carbon-footprint services as well as land-use–change monitoring. The company is also a source of information on business and climate change.

Tammy Lenski Brand Identity Design
Tammy Lenski LLC is a business that deals with conflict resolution in the workplace. The new logo was expected to be simple and clean, inspiring and inviting.

Troove Logo Design Process
Troove is a company based in Mountain View, California. It originally started out as a search engine for finding structured business applications to download, hence their name (a variation of the French word “trouve,â€� which means “to findâ€�). The new logo was inspired by the phrase “finders, keepers”.

Logo Design Process for Just Creative Design’s Award Winning Logo
In this article, Jacob Cass talks about how he decided on the name for his freelancing business, Just Creative Design, and the process he used to design the award-winning logo.

Logo Design Case Study
JMR Insurance Group is an insurance company based in Florida. Their new logo was created around the phrase “Protecting Your World”.

Berthier Associates Brand Identity Design
Berthier Associates is a Tokyo-based architecture firm with extensive experience in designing corporate office interiors, creating innovative workplaces, improving corporate image and fostering individual performance.

A-List Blogging Bootcamps’ Identity Design
A-List Blogging Bootcamps is a website that offers a series of short, live online training courses for bloggers.

Metro Aviation Logo Design Process
Metro Aviation is a helicopter transport company.

Creating a Business Logo
UserScape is the company behind HelpSpot, a market-leading, Web-based help-desk software solution.

Case Study: Brokers Logo Design Process
“Brokers runs stock market simulations, reality contests for college students of finance. A team of five members receives a portfolio of $1 million in virtual money to make trades in the Mexican stock market and the foreign exchange market. Principal message to be portrayed by the new logo? A fresh, impacting brand style but still giving the professional image of the event.”

Kick’s Logo Design Process
Kick is a chic women’s boutique with throwback glam décor. It is located in a progressive and growing downtown area. It aims for the distinguished in taste and style.

Blackberry Creek’s Logo Design Process
Blackberry Creek Community Church needed a logo…

Logo Design Process For Fitucci
Fitucci is a source for custom doors and windows. It specializes in luxury residential and commercial projects and supplies state-of-the-art doors and windows.

Sponsr Logo Design Process
Sponsr is a Web company in Orlando, Florida, that connects sponsors to event promoters, venues and producers. The visual identity was to be more end-user driven than b2b oriented.

LatitudeSouth’s Creative Process
LatitudeSouth is a new enterprise that offers a fresh approach to outsourcing legal services. Important objective: Its New Zealand origins are important to the company, though it works with clients all over the world.

HotBox Studios’ Logo Design Process
HotBox Studios is a company based in southeast England that specializes in creative animation and design.

Mindberry’s Logo Design Process
Mindberry GmbH is a company based in Vienna that offers consulting and project management services. It has established the business in Austria and is looking to expand service to the rest of Europe and the US. The Brand wants to target a young/trendy audience as well as more conservative companies.

Design Process of Undersea Productions
Undersea Productions is a team of underwater image specialists run by Josh Jensen and Liz Harlin, a husband-and-wife and video-and-photo duo with years of experience in all aspects of underwater imaging. They are truly passionate about the underwater world.

Design Process of Dimitrovi & Co.
Founded in the early ’90s in the city of Pleven and focused on delivering heavy machinery services (excavators, bulldozers and heavy trucks), Dimitrovi & Co. is now one of the largest construction companies in north Bulgaria.

The Logo Design Process From Start to Finish
Uke sells unique arrangements of chocolate as an alternative to gift baskets. It targets an upscale market.

The Logo Design Process: From Concept to Completion
eLIFELIST is an online community dedicated to acknowledging and fulfilling its members’ life goals.

Identity Design Process for Butterfield Photography
Butterfield Photography is run by Maria and Robert Butterfield, who each focus on a different area of photography: wedding and family photography, and commercial and sports photography. One of the constraints: The logo had to be usable across a broad range of businesses.

Logo Design: From Start to Finish
DANZK is a soon-to-be-launched lifestyle blog that focuses on culture, food, art and design from Denmark. The blog aims to expose the Danish way of life to locals and foreigners who are interested in the country. It recommends and reviews Danish products related to food, design and music. Problem: Come up with ideas free of clichés!

Process: Branding Ian Matteson
This brand and identity development project is for photographer Ian Matteson, an action and commercial-based photographer out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Along with Ian’s action and commercial work, he shoots a lot of film and fine art. The Logo was to compliment his style.

Dezeen Watch Store
The Dezeen Watch Store identity brief was initially small in scope, but the outcome has remarkable underlying complexity. Watch Store is Dezeen’s first retail venture. It specializes in watches by famous designers and boutique brands. The outcome: a dynamic clock identity!

Visual Identity: Sabienzia
Sabienzia is a dynamic and international enterprise. Its team has more than 20 years of experience in the area of teleworking, unified communication, virtualization, advanced analytics and green IT.

IBBT’s Logo Redesign
The Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology, a Flemish research institute, creates highly competent human capital through interdisciplinary, demand-driven basic research that targets ICT and broadband services in collaboration with companies and government.

Brokers Direct Identity Design
Brokers Direct is an online insurance company that offers quick, friendly and low-cost insurance for landlords, tenants, owners of vacant property, homeowners, students and owners of commercial properties.

A Guide to Creating Professional Quality Logo Designs
Here are some general rules of logo design and guidelines we should stick to in order to make high-quality logos. The author also explores how to put them into practice to create a logo design that works in the real world.

WebMYnd Logo Design Process
One of WebMYnd’s products is a browser plug-in that turns your Web-browsing history into an extension of your own memory. It allows you to keep a copy of everything you look at on the Web and search actual page images and text when you need to remember or find something.

Branding Fixel
Fixel is a small design agency that puts out top-shelf work. Its team of designers, developers and creative thinkers aims to help companies unlock the potential of their brand.

Apple & Eve Identity Development
This logo process post is for a company tantalizingly called, Apple & Eve.

Funcrumb Logo Design Process
Funcrumb, currently under development, is an online community that helps make your social life more active and stimulating. It makes it easy to find people who share your hobbies and interests, find romantic connections or establish new business contacts.

Green Candy’s Logo Design Process
Designing a logo is no easy task; a lot of thought is required to achieve the best possible design solution for the client. Here is the process for Green Candy.

Articles And Resources

10 Principles of the Logo Design Masters
The veterans of the logo design industry have achieved success for a reason. Sure, it’s partially due to years of practice, blood, sweat, tears and inky fingers, but it’s mainly because they stuck to the 10 solid-gold principles of world-class logo design.

Brand New
Brand New shares opinions about corporate and brand identity work.

Trademarkia
Trademarkia is promoted as “the ultimate research tool for logo designers.�

Steps in a Successful Logo Design Process
To design a memorable logo, the designer progresses through various stages of listening, research, development, feedback and changes.

(rb)

Showing and hiding content using JavaScript-based page manipulations for tabbed interfaces, collapsible elements, and accordion widgets is a common development pattern. Learn how your choice of hiding mechanism can influence content accessibility in assistive technologies like screen readers in an excerpt from Adaptive Web Design.

Designing with modular scales is one way to make more conscious, meaningful choices about measurement on the web. Modular scales work with—not against—responsive design and grids, provide a sensible alternative to basing our compositions on viewport limitations du jour, and help us achieve a visual harmony not found in compositions that use arbitrary, conventional, or easily divisible numbers. Tim Brown shows us how.

See @replies visualised in realtime

Back on September 15, 2010, it was "R U OK?" Day. This is a national day of action which is designed to raise awareness of suicide by encouraging people to reach out and make contact with others by asking "Are you OK?"

We were commissioned by the R U OK? organisation to create a visualisation that highlighted the connections people were making throughout the day, and after a number of rounds of brainstorming (and budget cuts) we chose to highlight the connections that were being made over Twitter.

Because of fears about subject matter we weren't allowed to highlight content contained in any tweets, so to gather our data we performed a search for all tweets in Australia that are directed at someone (@replies), geocoded both ends of the conversation, recorded the timestamp of the message, and map this connection in time and space. For each location we also perform frequency analysis on the tweets and provide a tag cloud of the most used words (available if you hover over a city).

All of this is done in realtime, so you can see actual conversations as they are formed. Beyond the realtime aspect, we also give you two weeks worth of historical data so that you can see the rise and fall of activity throughout the day and across weeks. Each of these hourly periods also has a unique pattern of replies that crisscross the country, showing up when people from other cities strike up conversation with one another.

It's interesting to see the times of day when people are on Twitter the most, and also see the days of the week when activity is high. On the actual R U OK? Day we saw a dramatic (~2x) spike in @reply activity which we could hopefully attribute to the spread of R U OK? Day.

The Achilles heel of this visualisation, however, is the amount of processing that it has to do. Firstly, it fetches a search from the Twitter API several times a minute (you have to be careful to stay within the rate limits), then for each tweet it has to check whether the sender and receiver have location data, and if they do, geocode both locations.

Geocoding is an expensive operation and because I'm geocoding roughly 200 points a minute, we quickly fall afoul of hourly geocoding rate limits. To counteract this, I have it setup to try geocoding via Google Maps, and than fail over to Yahoo! once we hit the limit. Somewhere along the way I implemented caching of geocoding results and we now have a pretty handy database of geocoded strings.

The price for daisy chaining all these APIs is fragility. It's a lot of work to keep this system up, and as a result I'll be taking the whole thing offline in about a week. (Also, it's costing me a fair bit in App Engine hosting charges.)

Still, if you want to check it out, you can for now. Thereafter, I'll replace it with a video of what it once was.

Update 2011-04-19: I've replaced it with a video of what it once was.

One of the advantages of having 2 billion people on the Internet is that every so often one of them sends you something for free. In this case, the kind people at Hopscotch sent me a couple of passes to a preview screening of Source Code. (And only briefly mentioned, in a passing, fleeting manner that I might -- if the right mood struck me -- want to blog about it)

When I sat down in the cinema last week to watch the movie, I was immediately on the back foot when trying to objectively assess it. For the past 6 months I've pretty much compared every movie I've seen to Inception and found them all wanting. It's certainly one of my favourite movies of the last 5 years. The reason it so affected my objectivity in this case is because Source Code has been labelled as "Inception, but better". Now that's pretty much sacrilege in my books, so I naturally wanted it to suck.

Although the two movies have some similar themes -- alternate realities, immersion in technology, subjective perceptions -- they are quite different films. For me, Inception felt like a brilliant idea that was taken to its furthest extreme, each scene taking you further down the rabbit hole. In Source Code I feel like a brilliant idea has been treated in a shallow manner. It's like Inception was a cult film that had been carefully crafted for mainstream appeal; whereas Source Code felt like a cult film that had been compromised for mainstream appeal.

Other comparisons that sprang to mind as I was watching Source Code included Groundhog Day and Quantum Leap (which got a cheeky nod in the movie via the inclusion of Scott Bakula as a voice actor), and there's definitely elements of Cyberpunk in there -- the digital environments of Neuromancer and Snowcrash spring to mind.

Aside from my bias towards Inception, there's also another admission I'll make that will get 50% of you readers offside. It is this: I didn't really like Moon. (The director -- Duncan Jones' -- previous film) The problem I have with Moon is the same one I have with Source Code, namely that it peaks too early. Key points of the plot are made aware to you halfway through the movie and from there on out it feels like you're just watching a tired story play out to its inevitable conclusion. Great idea. Poor structure.

My final conclusion on this film (based on my own experience and from observing others) is that if you liked Inception you'll probably like this less, and if you didn't like Inception then you'll probably like this more. Either way, it's still worth seeing, but depending on which camp you sit in you might want to save it for the couch.