'Tis the Season to put holiday hats on your logos!



I've spotted a few seasonal logo treatments in the wild but I've noticed (while investigating for this post) that MAJOR brand sites (like Amazon, eBay, Overstock.com, etc.) don't touch their logos. They'll add seasonal holiday graphics (e.g. snowflakes, ribbons, etc.) but they leave their logo alone.

Some samples from sites I visit:













Of course the granddaddy of all logos (logotypes) that can/have been "treated" is the Google logo. But their ever changing treatments are now a part of their "brand" so I guess that means they can get away with it without any negative affect. (I don't know what the negative affect would be ... it might simply be the affect of "it is annoying to change all the graphics on a website that is in full 24 hour operation".)

Labels: logos

OvernightPrints.com is having a design contest - design this guy's card and if he picks it then you win free business cards for life!

http://www.overnightprints.com/businesscards-for-life-contest.shtml?&adt=319010

I wonder if that offer translates to cards that you would design for clients. (Probably not... just thinking out loud.) (Er... thinking in writing?)

Labels: logos

I tried to start an informal underground club at school called "The D.A." (which was an homage to Harry Potter but in our case represented "Digital Artists"). It SORTA existed as an intangible thing. At the end of last quarter some students decided to start an official IMD club (called "The IMD Club"). They held a little informal contest to design a logo for the group so I did these (in an effort to get them to change the name to "The D.A." because it's just cooler).

I liked 'em for roughs! But the group decided to stick with the "IMD Club" name so now I display these for posterity.









(I added the "i" to some of these to incorporate the school name "AI".)

Labels: logos

Damitol! Back in Web Design 2 class (otherwise known as "Introduction to Web Design") at the Art Institute (Los Angeles) we were asked to design a site for a fictional drug known as Damitol. We were to design the site in Fireworks (at the time it was still a Macromedia product) and the site was to include an original logo design (for whatever our particular version of Damitol did), the logo of the pharmaceutical company and a link to their website. We needed a set number of pages and it needed to look as real as possible (though it wasn't required to ACTUALLY be a full-working website... it was a "design" class after all).

Well I'd just seen the GENIUS movie, CHILDREN OF MEN, and so I was inspired to make my Damitol a suicide drug. I completed the assignment, uploaded it to the school server and that was the end of the story... I thought. Turns out I did a great job at SEO and if you actually Google "Damitol" my site is the first to show up. (Or at least it was... I just deleted it's old location today.)

This led to me getting a rather long email from a "good hearted person" who "found my site humorous" but thought that I best take it down because I was linking to a real pharmaceutical company and using their actual logo. (OK ... good point.)

So that was like a year ago and I finally got around to finding the old files and changing the logo and updating the thing.

My version of Damitol now lives here! (I get this dark sense of humor from my mother... just so you know where to place blame.)

Labels: damitol, logos, web design

When I was a little kid my parents would sometimes take me to the Santa Monica mall (for typical mall shopping things). Then afterward my father would cross us over to the shops outside of the mall so that he could visit Hennessey and Ingalls "Art and Architecture" bookstore. I hhhhhhhated it. I was soooo bored surrounded by big tomes full of boring art history things. He loved it.

Eventually they developed those dingy shops and dirty streets into the 3rd Street Promenade and Hennessey and Ingalls moved around the corner (now it's on Wilshire between 2nd and 3rd streets).

Earlier this year I found myself at the Promenade with my father and I graciously granted him the trip into H&I. To my SHOCK and SURPRISE - H&I now had a huuge selection of effin' cool books (to geeks like me) about web, package, poster, graphic, graffiti, logo (and etc.) DESIGN. (Don't ask me why some art bores me and some art thrills me... I guess it's just my taste.)

My first stop was to look for the Logo Lounge series (which is flippin' cool) before I then pored through all the web design idea books. We didn't spend much time there but, now excited, I soon drug my friend back and we sat and browsed their selections for a while.

The golden find was this book - The Web Designer's Idea Book:



The book is chock full of photos of sites based on general ideas about their design styles (i.e. "sites that are pink", "sites that collage", etc.). I NEEDED THIS BOOK when I started in my major!! I decided to buy it then and there! And then remembered that I was a cheap bastard and went home and found it on Better World Books for less $ and with free shipping. It's now full of little post-it tabs.

Turns out the book is based on the author's website - DesignMeltdown.com

There is, however, one big MISSING for me in this book and site - the "Movie Site" under site types. Where is it? It's a distinct genre of its own! I'd even accept "Radio, TV & Film" if they wanted to break it out further. (Music & Bands already has a category!) But really... I only care about the movie sites and how they carry across their concept from screen to monitor.

So I decided that from time to time I'm going to feature some movie sites in this blog - to fill this huge gap in the DesignMeltdown/Web Designer's Idea Book's world. Just to give credit where credit is sometimes due. They're already giving Emmys away for TV websites. I'm hoping Movie sites will soon qualify for tech Oscars. (So I can still hope for an Oscar in my life.)

Labels: books, design, ideabook, logos, web