art
design
film
performance
photography
music
word

GET STATED UPDATES

Stated Search
Advertisement

 

 
Featured in Alltop
 
 

 

Friday
Jun152012

DESIGN: Inspiration for the Logo-less

(C) 2010 Thomas V Hartmann (Click to view full-size)

I’m wandering off of my patch a bit, I know, but logo design has been on my mind lately. Hardly a day goes by, it seems, when I don’t find myself coveting the clever abstraction on someone’s business card or filled with envy over the cool symbol or mascot they use as their Twitter avatar.

When I made my debut in the Twitterverse, I struggled over what I could use to replace that newbie’s egg. I didn’t have a logo (my business cards were the templated variety from MOO, and I wasn’t crazy about using a photo of myself as my avatar (alas, like many other photographers I am camera-shy). I could have cooked up a simple type treatment of my initials, but I didn’t want people to mistake me for the element Thorium, and another photographer, Tomas Van Houtryve of VII (@TomasVH), was already using a simple, dignified “TVH”.

I had to pick something, so I decided on a photograph from one of my ongoing series. It’s a nice enough photo—a nighttime BW shot of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philly—but that hardly makes it a good Twitter avatar. Shrunken to 48 x 48 pixels, it’s tough to discern as a bridge, let alone which one. And while it’s a photo I’m proud to have taken, I’ve never really thought of it as a signature image. I shoot fashion and editorial and portraits in addition to landscapes, and I don’t want people to think of me as just “that nighttime BW guy.”

Anyway, it’s high time I replaced that confounded bridge and got a proper logo, ideally one I can use as an avatar as well as on my website and biz cards. I’ve been mustering the courage to ask our overworked Creative Director to develop a few concepts for me, but in the meantime it’s been tough to decide which direction I want to take with my logo; for example, do I want something that unambiguously says “photographer” or something subtler? And should I opt for sleek and modern or maybe something with a bit of a vintage/retro feel? 

I started poking around on the web looking for info on logo design best practices and additional examples and pretty soon found myself down the rabbit hole of logo design “inspiration” sites and other resources. The former, which include sites like Logomoose and Logofaves, may be old hat for graphic designers, but for a logo-less photog like me they’ve been a great source of ideas and, I have to admit, a lot of fun to surf (although my logo envy is now approaching unhealthy levels…). Anyway, I include links to some of my favorites below, but be warned: it’s probably best to visit these sites when you have a fair amount of time you don’t mind killing; they’ll have you caught in their powerful time-suck faster than you can say “branded identity.”

Logomoose:
www.logomoose.com

Logofaves:
www.logofaves.com

Both of these are “inspiration” and community sites where designers can showcase their work (and maybe land clients), join in discussions in various forums, and more. Logomoose has nearly 500 pages of logos from designers from all over the world. You can read a brief interview with Logomoose founder Dirk Leys here.

A Flickr set of all the pages from Al Cooper’s World of Logotypes (1974).
The appearance of this long-out-of-print work on the web caused quite a buzz on the design blogs a few years back, but if you’re not familiar, it’s a compendium of the sort of logos The Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce art department will be cooking up if Mad Men lasts another 7 seasons.

Logo Design History and Classic Brand Glossary by Parisian branding specialists logoorange. Here you can browse alphabetically and read the story behind the logos of dozens of well-known brands, including Alpha Romeo, Danone, Microsoft, and 3M.

Logo of the Day: Does pretty much what it says on the package, although it’s no longer being updated daily.

« DESIGN: The World's First Living Buildings by International Living Future Institute | Main | MUSIC: 'There She Goes Again,' and Again »

Reader Comments

There are no comments for this journal entry. To create a new comment, use the form below.

PostPost a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.

My response is on my own website »
Author Email (optional):
Author URL (optional):
Post:
 
Some HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>