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Tags: Code, Content, Fonts, Plugins, RSS, WordpressYour logo’s every curve and color must exist for a reason. All elements should come together to contribute to an overall powerful and clear message easily conveyed to anyone who sees it.
Let us start with color. Colors mean something. Some colors make you mad, some make you calm and some make you agitated and so on. Every color has a psychological impact on people and a good mastery of such knowledge will prove to be very useful in creating your logo.
Composition of Elements
Selecting the right images shapes for your logo and arranging them also requires a good amount of thought. Overdone logos with a lot of curves and circles might leave you confused and overwhelmed. At the same time, some are too simple that it leaves you unimpressed with no clear idea what the business behind that logo wants to say. Investing time and effort on trial-and-error tests on your logo might seem a tedious task, but once overcome, you will reap the rewards with more response and more results from your viewers.
Getting It All Together
Before we think of what color or shape, at the base of our minds is what your logo should symbolize. The “what” comes first before the “how”. From the base sketch, to the colors, to the shapes, always check if every addition gives more value to your logo in association with your brand. In addition to the value of the parts of your logo, another thing you should keep a keen eye out for is the overall balance of your design. You must think about how to balance your logo design well enough that each stroke is where it should be and everything taken in its totality equates to a clear message so that people can understand:
What your business does and what it believes in
The products and services you provide
The advantage of choosing your products and services over others
Going over some popular logos very familiar to us, we notice the use of small fonts, use of the color red and arches. Let us dissect these elements for a minute.
Big companies use small fonts to convey that despite the enormous size and spread of their organization, people from all walks of life, even the less prestigious, can still make business with them. A small type makes people less daunted and rather more at ease in approaching the company.
The color red, not only grabs our attention, but it also communicates a sense of professionalism, passion and stability. That’s why it’s no surprise that several financial or banking companies make use of this shade like Mastercard, WellsFargo, and HSBC.
Now let us go to the use of arches. Arches can be used in a variety of ways and in conjunction other elements or letters in your logo. When used overhead, the arch can represent an umbrella to convey protection. Alternatively, in the same sense, when used under the text, an arch can convey reliability like a net catches circus acrobats when they fall. With lines arched in different directions, it is very possible that you can communicate a sense of protection, confidence and trust.
It goes to show that there is no need for too much incorporation of lines and shapes to convey a message to the people. Going overboard with symbols and colors in a logo can create too many elements that people will only add fuss instead of value.
Double check your designs and before you have your professional color printing company work on your logo, make sure that you have created it properly and have thought it out well. You must achieved the proper balance of using symbols that mean something akin to your company and keep them as simple and neat enough as possible. Balanced and uncluttered, remember that.
About the Author: Kaye Z. Marks is an avid writer and follower of developments in commercial color printing industry and how these improvements can benefit small to medium-scale business.
Although I most often work in projects requiring AJAX, I love FLASH components. I know Flash is a SEO killer when not used right, and that it can really cripple a website is the user happens to be using an old browser or if he decided to disable Flash support but there are times when things can only be done by using Flash.
I don’t mean only the dazzling effects you can do with Flash but also the endless interactions you can obtain using ActionScript. For instance, check the 3D wall galleries below.
They can be obtained using a component from Flashloaded.com. The cool about this component is that you can obtain all the effects you see on the picture by using simple configuration details. The component does the rest. Flashloaded is a website dedicated to one overall goal – to provide you with the most innovative, cost-effective flash components and extensions for your website.
At their site you can find almost anything you might need, including Flash movies, Flash website Templates, Flash Gallery, Flash CMS, 3D interactive interfaces, as well as basic elements of FLASH material such as fonts, sounds, video loops, etc. Best of all, many of them are free, and you can re-design, re-develop them, although there’s an agreement you must adhere to. In addition, Flashloaded provides RSS feeds; you can subscribe it for stay abreast of the latest FLASH components resources.
Tags: ActionScript, AJAX, CMS, Components, Content, Design, Extension, Flash, flash components, flash gallery, flashloaded, Fonts, interactivity, RSS, Support, using flash, Video, WordpressIf you’ve got tired of using lorem ipsum as dummy text for your designs and of using the Lipsum Generator to create it, you might want to check out the Dummy Text Generator.
Not only does it create your standard lorem ipsum, but it also gives you several other texts to choose from — now why didn’t I think of that?
The advanced setting gives you some options to play with different font settings, similar to other online tools to compare fonts that I’ve written about.
On the downside, it doesn’t generate dummy text in list format, which Lipsum does.
E-consultancy has an amusing list/rant of top 10 web site annoyances.
Although many of these items have been brought up before, it’s never a bad thing to be reminded of what not to do.
While I agree with most of the points raised, I disagree about the use of ‘intrusive’ advertising such as overlays and interstitials on some sites.
Of course, I would rather that these forms of advertising did not exist.
However, I understand that as people expect content to be provided for free and users increasingly suffer from banner blindness, marketers are having to move to more intrusive forms of advertising in order to be sure that their ads are being seen.
I’d also like to add a couple of my own peeves to the list.
One method I often use to assess how well a site is built and managed is to try out the search.
If the results number in the hundreds, are poorly presented, and lack relevance then I know that the site owner has not spent much time thinking about the web site’s usability.
It’s even more of a red flag if the search results page shows a percentage relevancy number for each result — you know, result #4 is 58% relevant while result #5 is only 52% relevant. What does this information actually mean and how is it supposed to be used?!
This was a useless feature when it was introduced 10+ years ago and it remains so today. Get rid of it.
One of the easiest ways to improve the design and usability of your web site is to have good typography. That’s why it’s so frustrating when I come across sites that suffer from small text, cramped paragraphs and lists, and hard-to-read text and link colors.
There are so many examples of good typography on the web — MSNBC, The New York Times (funny Stephen Colbert column), Slate, and Time to name just a few — that there’s really no excuse for poor typography.
It’s also easier than ever to compare fonts and typographic layout than ever.
That’s my 2c. Any more pet peeves to add to the list?
