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imjustcreative-logo-design

This is Part 14 of the Logo Design Round-Up series. This ongoing series showcases a collection of logos and brand marks, self submitted by a bunch of freelance designers and creative folk in many creative areas. These designers use the logos to sell, promote, brand and market their various skills.

I was approached late last year by Foehn & Hirsch and asked if I would consider taking on the job of rebranding their existing identity. In terms of client prestige, this was a epic challenge for me. Certainly the biggest project I had yet taken on in terms of overall project requirements.

A beautiful photograph of part of the Apple logo showing portions of it’s construction, apparently not just a pretty apple. This photograph taken from Apple’s corporate identity guide, 1989.

The Love Ampersand logo was the result of a few hours of procrastinating one Saturday morning. I had plenty of ‘proper work’ to be getting on with, but drifted towards ‘playing’ instead. Something I am racked with guilt over.

This is a sweet opportunity to own the original limited edition version of Pentagram ‘Marks’. It is now quite a rare book, hard to find a new and sealed copy for a reasonable price. Expect to pay around £150 for a copy of ‘Marks’ on Amazon.

In the process of creating logo designs, this freelancer invariably ends up with a surplus of ideas, unused & unwanted. Some have potential to be solid logomarks in their own right, assuming you can re-engineer the name and make certain tweaks to the overall design.

Is it possible to make a viable career as a freelance logo designer? If not a career, how about a period of just earning enough to pay the bills and mortgage or rent? Or if you are living at home, having shit loads of money to go out and buy designer type things, like two new Apple Mac Pro and 30″ Cinema Displays?

My Twitter feed this morning was lighting up with a post from @Issue on the ‘UK Space Agency Logo Controversy’. You get the usual commentators instantly assuming that the latter copied the former. Without any information to base this criticism, they go ahead and slam whatever logo and designer is in their sites.

And there we have it, or don’t. Doobybrain experienced a fleeting redesign of the Google homepage and more importantly for me, a cleaned up Google logo. The drop shadow and bevel effects are still there but considerably less obvious. Still would have liked to have seen a completely flat version minus drop shadow and any bevel effects.

From TutToaster, an excellent round-up of some of the juiciest brand identity guidelines. These typically go way past a logo design, this is the holy grail of brand identity design and will usually require considerable investment from the client to …

This is not a full logo process post as this particular logo design was born whilst working on a previous logo project ’52 Keys’. I’ll just run through the thinking that got me from one logo design to doing something different.

I get a number of logo requests asking me to work for free each week. some are just a few words, maybe the odd sentence. Some however are a little more detailed, such as the above.

Logo Process – WavePulse Acoustics Identity Development. Wavepulse Acoustics was not a usual identity project. A logo design rushed out in a matter of a few hours, not something I would usually ‘shout from the rooftops’.

The most iconic browser identity and my favourite internet browser, FireFox, translated to crop circle. Just shocked to find this on Google, shocked because it’s been around for years and that I have only just stumbled on it. There is a dedicated website article, hosted on the Oregon State Linux Users Group website on the planning and construction of this amazing field art.

I often get asked why my logo design process seems to differ from many other freelance logo designers. I don’t take your money, scurry away for a week then present you with 4 gleaming logo design ideas for you to choose from. You choose one, offer up some remarks then I scurry away again and make several rounds of alterations and changes. After a few days, I come back to you with a more complete logo. Then possibly a few more changes before completing the project. Finally, hoping to get paid.

This logo design process for Keyboard Kahuna has been fun to put together, lots of images showing the explorations needed to end up with our final result. Although from the start, Thomas and I both agreed on the basic route, the project still took ages and many rounds of tweaking before we were both incredibly happy with the result.