The Brand Fixer Pledge

The Brand Fixer is on a mission to find & fix poorly functioning brands and/or logos of said brands.

In most cases the brand and/or logo is beyond help or recovery, so the Brand Fixer adopts, and practices, the most humane method of brand repair: Duct Tape.

The results are dramatic. See for yourself.

The Brand Fixer uses professional judgement in determining which brands and/or logos need to be fixed, as well as latching onto any hyped up media story of the hour.

The Brand Fixer pledges to be the first, or last, on the scene to assist and give appropriate aid, whenever and where ever it is needed. Your brand may be of a local geographical locality, but the Brand Fixer is global.

Why Yahoo?

Unless you really have been living under a boulder for the last few years, then it should come as no surprise that the Brand Fixer has to take immediate action on this long suffering brand. Don’t get me started on Flickr…

The Brand Fixer hates to see the actual logo design covered up in such a way as it’s not half bad, but as we all know: a brand is more than the logo. Actually, in this case, the brand is far less than the logo.

Yahoo deserves little sympathy for the collective actions of the management, but the Brand Fixer has a duty to perform regardless of circumstance. Yahoo has done everything within it’s power to destroy itself from the inside-out.

The only course of action: Yahoo has to be fixed.

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Read Brand Fixer #1—Yahoo Gets Fixed on imjustcreative - logo & brand identity design portfolio and blog.

Hey hey! Only posted my first Type Hero yesterday and then saw Appetite, designed by Denis Serebryakov, which simply had to be mentioned. Denis has also designed a much thinner version called Appetite Contrast.

Just look at those sweet sweet letter forms, those ligatures, the multilingual glyphs. It all adds up to a scrummy lettering typeface which is pegged to be perfect for logo designs, and other less useful design stuff.

Think I’m going to enjoy finding typefaces and fonts to feature on Type Hero.

You can purchase Appetite for $49 per font: Regular and Italic. Webfont versions also available.

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Hey hey! If you want to rank #1 for Logo Design on Google then all you need to do, urm, as stated by Matt Cutts, is to link out, urm, to porn sites and you’ll rank #1 for Logo Design.

So there we have it straight from the horses mouth: some targeted SEO advice if you are looking to rank #1 for Logo Design. All you have to do is, urm, link to porn sites and you’ll rank for #1 on Logo Design in Google.

You can also practice some keyword stuffing for Logo Design as well to, urm, help you rank for #1 for Logo Design… on, urm, Google.

You might also be therefore wondering where my links to porn sites are? So, urm, more useful advice is to hide these porn links by colouring, urm, the text white. That’s also really useful advice to, urm, rank #1 for Logo Design.

Please email if you want my list of porn site URL’s so you too can rank, urm, #1 on Google for Logo Design. Or try this for fun: try and find them on my website.

Disclaimer

Obviously you can’t rank #1 for Logo Design as I’ll be ranking #1 for Logo Design, but you can try for #2.

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Read How to Rank #1 on Google for… Logo Design By Matt Cutts on imjustcreative - logo & brand identity design portfolio and blog.

Yo! New feature on imjustcreative: Type Hero—where I will, on occasion, highlight a font/typeface that catches my eye. I am always coming across typefaces and fonts that are just perfect for logo designing.

To launch Type Hero off in style here is the irresistible Jochan Family, designed by Hubert Jochan who started his own Type Foundy in 2007. These retro scripty style fonts are generally and adequately well provided for, but Jocham has that something I can’t quite put my finger on.

By the way, Hubert based Jochan on his own logotype.

Jochan comes in regular and italic and you can download Jochan Family for a reduced price of $39, usually $78, via MyFonts.

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RPM 45 is a spivvy—I’m also quite partial to that particular hue of blue they have used for the graphics—free condensed font from the Infamous Foundry.

The uppercase set sets you on one course, but then look at the lowercase a, b, c etc and you’ll quickly see you are not getting a regular starched hard line condensed font. This font has taken inspiration from the French alphabets of the 1930′s period. It’s really smooth.

RPM 45 is certainly free, but it’s good for ones personal karma if one donates via the “Pay what you want” button. RPM 45 is well worthy of some of your cash, so ring it up buddy.

K Download RPM 45 (and maybe donate?) http://cargocollective.com

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Here we go with Part 17 of the Logo Design Round-Up, and you can catch-up with Part 16 Logo Design Round-Up. As with Part 16 I am really chuffed to see so many designers submitting their own brand logo designs for this logo design round-up series. Read how I butchered Helvetica to create my own logo design.

Please note that all submissions are included as this series isn’t a best-of, or some elitist logo display. In this post the logos are displayed in alphabetical order.

If you have your own brand logo for your creative business then you are welcome to be part of this logo design series.

Take Part

If you would like to join the fun and have your own brand logo showcased with a written description then flick through this post: Submit Your Logo For Logo Design Round-Up Series

All there is to do now is present ten of your logo designs with some juicy descriptions to boot. Enjoy.

Pinterest

I have taken the liberty of pinning all the logos to Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/imjustcreative/logo-design-round-up as well as adding a Pin button to each and every logo design featured.

Logo Design Round-Up Part 16

Chris Beaumont: Beaumont Design: Logo & Brand Identity Design — http://dribbble.com/Beaumontdesign

This is my current logo to represent me as a freelance designer. I have recently finished a redesign of it which involved tweaking it’s proportions, adding the use of the golden ratio and softening the points making it easier on the eye. The result of changes also allowed it to look more balanced when combined with text as well as working better at smaller sizes.

The Mark is a combination of the tip of a pencil and the use of negative space to represent snowfall at the top of a mountain. The reason for this is that my surname, Beaumont, means ‘beautiful mountain’ in French.

The font I use is Novecento wide in both bold and normal weight. I chose this font as it is a very crisp font with a minimalist style that would transfer the information needed without drawing the attention away from the mark.

The colour scheme is a basic black and white to allow the negative space on the mark to really appear like crisp white snow and to conform with the minimalist style of the rest of the branding.

Constantinos Dobrovolski: cutdsgn — logo & brand identity design — http://cutdsgn.com

While still on my 3rd year as a Graphic & Advertising Design student, i was looking for a «cool» brand name (since my actual name is kinda difficult to be read/pronounced) that would be affiliated with simplicity and minimalism, as design styles. Since i love the process of subtraction in my work, i ended with the word «cut» & «dsgn», which brought me finally to «cutdsgn». The best part is that the initial letters of the two words, are the respectively initials of my full name.

The actual logo process lasted for a few months of brainstorming, sketching and design on my free time. I have to admit it although, if i would be my own client, i would tie a rock to my neck and i’d throw myself into the bottom of the sea. Yeah, the process hurt a lot since i didn’t put a deadline or any design restriction from the beginning.

After a long time, i decided that my goal would be to design a logo mark that would represent «cut» in a minimal way and on the other hand, it would combine the initials of the two words. Being a fan of the «Smith» style, i ended up with a square logo mark that contains in negative space the «c» & «d» characters, that stand from each other with the use of two «cuts». The typeface i used for the naming is a slightly edited Breuer Text Bold, which in my mind it could be the modern child of Helvetica & Din families.

For the moment, i use a neutral grayish color palette which to be honest, it suits me as a personality; although a new color scheme is not impossible to be developed, parallel with the actual website design. Concluding, i’m quite pleased and probably proud with myself as i managed to present an overview of my personality as a designer and as a character into such a simple logo.

David Bauer – David Bauer Photography Design

I love minimal and clean design so I knew from the start that my logo would have to reflect that. And since I’m using my name as the name of the company I wanted to include my initials into the design. It did not have to really say anything about what I’m doing but it would have to be usable as a standalone symbol and/or watermark.

I’ve gone trough like 10 different ideas in the last few months and finally this one grew on me. One day I just flipped my initials to the vertical and there it was! And I was quite surprised to see some things that go together well – a smiling face, ‘Victory’ sign and a computer mouse. And I’m sure I will find more things in this symbol over the time.

Searching for the right font took me even longer and I finally settled with one of the cleanest ones – Gotham (still have a possible runner up – Avenir). It was used for all the typography as well as for the symbol.

Everything is just black&white at the moment. I’m still working on my website so if there will be any colors, they can be also implemented into this logo.

Eric Coddington: Graphic Designer — http://ericcoddington.com

When it comes to designing for a client I am very focused, straight forward, and on target. Like every other designer I am definitely my own worst critic, which had lead me in the past to be very schizophrenic when designing for myself. Not knowing what aspects of my personality, or style to highlight. I’ve used so many personal logos over the past 10 years I’ve lost count.

When I recently moved to a new city (Portland, OR) I decided I need to start fresh again, but this time I needed to create a personal brand that really showed who I am.  Not what I like to design, not what I want to be or become, but something that is just me.

Then it hit me, nothing is more me – than me! At that moment of realization I knew my logo was done, and I didn’t even design it, my mom did, with her Polaroid camera, in the early 80′s. Whether you know my logo Is a photo of me jumping off the living room chair or not, it doesn’t matter.  You can feel that person in the logo.  It’s someone you know, or more likely than not, it was you at some point in your life.  And at my core, that’s who I am still today… just bigger.

Now, when handing out my business cards to potential clients, no previous logo has had the success at breaking the ice as this one has. It makes them not only want to know about what I do, but also who I am. It gives potential clients a sense of familiarity with me. It’s an instant relationship builder. And at its essence, isn’t that all a logo really is, a relationship builder.

Kelvin Farrell — kelvinwins: graphic/web designer — http://kelvinwins.com

I’ve found nothing more difficult than designing a logo to promote myself as a designer. I could never settle on anything that I felt truly portrayed me in the right light. To be honest, I hadn’t even settled on a name for a long time after I’d started designing – I was just using my personal name.

What kicked off my thinking was a jokey phrase that my then-housemate used to say; “I win at life”. I thought nothing of it at the time but eventually it creeped in to my vocabulary and I’d mix it up by saying things like “I win at cooking/football/watching TV etc.” One night I replied to someone by saying “I win at design”, and that’s how I initially came up with my brand and domain name, kelvinwins.

From there it was pretty simple to come up with my logo. The idea of playing on that ‘win’ phrase was all too tempting. I thought of a range of ways of doing it; trophies, medals, podium, but eventually settled on a ribbon/badge as it was a bit more understated. I didn’t want to come across as arrogant, which I felt some of the other ideas could have.

The logo has been through a bit of development and has evolved across it’s life. Recently I’ve refined it, given it a bolder font (Frutiger LT 95 Ultra Black) and made it single colour. I’m very happy with it in it’s current form. It’s cheeky, but more in a fun manner, rather than anything unprofessional.

Lisa Dale: Graphic Designer — http://lisamariedale.tumblr.com

My logo came about during an exercise on self promotion and I was having such a nightmare thinking of what to design for myself. Seems silly really when you cant think of how to design for yourself but when working with clients the job seems much more straight forward. I looked around me for inspiration at the time and decided that my logo had to say something about me and my personal style within design.

The idea came from my love for Typography which keeps growing, and my logo has a handwritten feel to it which was deliberate and inspired me at the time. The font I used is called Stars From Our Eyes. This font is perfect for my self promotion as my work has a more personal feel to it, like the hand rendered effect from the font.

I have a keen eye for colour and the colour I chose for the typeface is a pastel calm soothing colour. This does not mean to say I wont use vibrant bright colours in my design! My work has a consistent colour theme in terms of light shades and delicate colours. Each colour compliments the other and balances the type perfectly. The good thing about this logo is it works just as well reversed in black and white, and when I see this logo it may appear to be simple and not much thought has gone into the idea but for me its legible, adaptable on all media and professional.

These are the things I want my logo to say about myself. Altogether the logo probably took me a total of two months because I could not find my direction at first. The process was difficult and I found myself questioning at times whether this logo was really me but now it is a working logo I couldn’t be more happier with the outcome.

Mat Ranson & Izabella Bielawksa – Mandala Studio: Art Direction, Design & Branding – http://mandalastudio.net

As most designers can attest, branding yourself is difficult. It quickly becomes clear that you are the best and worst person to do it. You’re the best person because you know your business intimately and will spend as much time as necessary on it. You’re the worst person because without factors to ring-fence the process (namely self-discipline, a budget and a finite amount of time) it will never be finished. But, we knew this and so we tried hard not to fall into the trap.

So we went through a quick rejection process to arrive at the name and the logo:
• Instinctively, we both wanted to use a basic shape for the logo: either a square or a circle
• We wanted the word Labyrinth, so that was the original concept, and the shape could be square
• We’re based in Asia so ‘Labyrinth’ didn’t feel like a word people would be familiar with
• Mandalas feel like the Eastern equivalent of Labyrinths

If you are not familiar with mandalas – they are traditional Hindu and Buddhist images which depict the Wheel Of Life. A mandala is essentially a detailed decorative image and they come in many different designs. We weren’t personally concerned with the religious connotations so much, more the shape and the pattern potential. We referenced a lot of imagery to draw them – mostly mandala designs of course – but also pattern work from our huge copy of Owen Jones brilliant book ‘The Grammar Of Ornament’.

The type went through a few iterations. We wanted the mandala as the focus, with type that balanced it. Originally we had chosen Erik Spiekermann’s Officina Serif in caps at quite a small size. But it was dwarfed by the mandala and not a heavy enough weight. We settled on Clarendon because the serif decoration sits well with the vibrant symbols and it is a heavy typeface with a hint of nostalgia, which gives gravity to the two things together.

Mandala Studio is two people and one’s favourite colour is sky blue, the other’s is blood red. So that was a simple, but important decision on colour. It also means we have front-and-back business cards: one of us on the blue side, the other on the red and we use the blue for non-urgent correspondence like estimates and mail-outs, and the red, of course, for invoices.

Michael Warren: Design + Direction — http://makewithmichael.com

Born with a common name, I knew I would have to anchor my brand with a strong symbol. Not only did I want the design to be minimal, simple and easy to read, but I wanted it to reflect the type of work that I produce.

My initials – MW – have many interesting features that helped me glean design cues. Toying with shapes and pattern reflections, I wanted to convey my brand-mark using four simple triangles that would outline the “m” and “w”.

Offset for the quirkiness and creativity of my work, I managed to merge the triangular shapes into a stylized, yet easy to read, symbol of my initials. However, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for me during the design process. In seeing that the triangles were pointed, it made my design feel too aggressive, so I added subtle hints of rounded edges to help soften up the symbol.

I wanted to keep my brand in black & white to convey professionalism and minimalism, so the symbol stayed in it’s native conception color. The typeface I use to accompany my brand is Din, for it perfectly complements the modern feel of my symbol, with a nice touch of friendliness.

Rick Raby: Graphic Designer & Student — http://rickraby.tumblr.com

I came up with the logo when I first started my FdA, I was probably no more than 2 months into the course. I was sat in a contextual studies lecture and instead of taking notes I though I’d do some doodling. That night, I went back to my flat and made it in illustrator and I’ve stuck with it ever since.

The logo is just my initials (My full name is Richard Adam Raby) but it’s clean and I love that about it. At the time, I didn’t know much about fonts and all I really wanted was one with straight legs for the R’s, so I went for Akzidenz Grotesk. At the time that choice didn’t really mean to much to me but ever since I’ve had a tendency to use this type of modernist typeface – I use DinPro throughout my stationary and on every presentation I’ve made in the last year.

The colour of the logo is a bit of a funny one. When I first started putting work on my blog, it was all converted from CMYK to RGB, so the black was never a proper screen black but I always liked that for some reason. So ever since I’ve been using this 94% CMYK black in my logo and stationary. It also turns out that its the same colour as the default background in Acrobat Pro – and yes, I did have a mini panic when I found this out and wondered where half my PDF had gone.

Paul Attard: Graphic Design — http://wearegoat.com

Goat is a small design studio based in London, made up of myself and my Russian colleague.

I’ll first have to start out with the naming of the studio; to cut a long story short, my colleagues surname is Golev and mine is Attard. We started working on project while still studying at University and felt that we had a very good back and forth so decided to create a name for the collective. We chose to call it goat as a combination of the two surnames put together symbolising the connection of two halves joining together to create a whole entity.

With the name out of the way it was time to start the long process of self-branding, which somehow feels like the hardest job. We settled on the font LTC Twentieth Century which is basically Futura with some fancy alternatives thrown in. We were looking for this slight peculiarity in a font and LTC Twentieth Century just seemed to have something we both completely agreed upon.

We then wanted to include a feature to draw attention to the two separate halves, which later came in the form of the yellow line down the middle. It works in two ways; firstly the separation down the middle, which we then incorporated into all aspects of our brand. Secondly it was inspired by the peculiar pupils of a goat’s eye.

With everything put together the final touch was the yellow colour which was decided upon due to the vibrance of yellow. It is a nice contrast from the black and adds something small that stands out.

Wouter Buning: vormverteller —brand identity designer – http://wouterbuning.nl

As a young creative professional I believed working under one’s own name was a sign of uncreativity: a creative person should have a creative brand name. And I was convinced that potential clients would take a corporate brand more serious. I wanted to stay away from the ’21-year-old-working-from-mum-&-dad’s-attic’ image. So for many years I struggled in finding the brand name that suited me well.

I switched the name three or four times (once because of a pending lawsuit…). None of them endured. I never planned on expanding into a business (it always was going to be just me), so at some point I managed to let go of my former prejudices and finally decided using my own name as brand name. It’s been running for 5 years now and I’m still completely happy with it. Even now, my brand identity keeps growing on me.

Since my brand name wasn’t that creative there was room for a creative job description ;D So 2 years ago I invented the title vormverteller. That’s Dutch for ‘shapeteller’ derived from ‘storyteller’.

About the same time I added a few supporting colours to the existing pallet, enabeling me to promote different design services under separate colours. And in an identity project I always like to create a rich black and grey spectrum that fits the main colour, so each brand has it’s own black and greys. I guess that’s just an aspect of my design-lunaticness.

The logo mark is a typographical design solution. The idea was to create one strong shape for my initials, like a graphical/geometric signature, with an interesting balance between round and sharp edges. While I was sketching, I added a hint of 3D movement within a 2D shape. The rotation of the logo mark suggests looking upward and forward, adds some dynamic and I feel it makes the logo optimistic/future minded. I adjusted the ‘w’ to keep a solid base.

A little joke I implemented was a hint to the old ink dip-pens in the shape of the ‘b’. But the funniest thing happened a few months ago, when one of my students came up to me and said he thought the logo mark was a drawing hand: he never saw the initials. How is that for a bonus!

Andy Valde: Graphic Designer — http://StoneSoup3.com

Hi! My name is Andy Valde and I am a graphic designer for my company Stone Soup 3. Below is the description of our company and we can be found at StoneSoup3.com

“Stone Soup” originated as a French tale about 3 soldiers returning home from the Napoleonic Wars. They arrive at a village where they quickly learn that, because of war times, the villages are unwilling to share, trade or sell any food or supplied. So the Soldiers decide to bring an empty pot to the village square, fill it with water, place it over a fire and drop a large stone into the pot. One villager becomes curious and asks them what they are doing. They explain that they are making Stone Soup even though some potatoes would really make the soup taste much better. After hearing this, the villager decides they have some potatoes to spare. He brings the potatoes and drops them into the pot. As he does this, other villagers follow and contribute what they have.

This is a story of people coming together to reach an over all goal. This is exactly what our company Stone Soup 3 is. Each one of us contributes individually with our expertise to an overall goal. This way we help our clients, like the soldiers from the story,  achieve success for their company. The number three at the end of our logo signifies our company trinity: Audience, Concept, Execution. Eric Lamkins, Heather Murray, and Andy Valde are the current contributors to the overall pot of creativity and execution. Learn more about us by visiting StoneSoup3.com.

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Read Logo Design Round-Up Part 17 on imjustcreative - logo & brand identity design portfolio and blog.

This explanation of the crucial art of Pixel-Fitting by Dustin Curtis is probably the best one out there. Dustin explains the importance of Pixel-Fitting, a pixel precision routine, using tasty diagrams and clear English.

Pixel-Fitting can be tricky, but I think that with these really useful diagrams you’ll come away pretty feeling good about it.

K Read more on http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting

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If you are absolutely loving this incredible logo for Hypercompact.com, designed by Morgan Allan Knutson, then you will absolubloodylutely love this (below) animation of it, created by Igor Ginzburg.

You need to check how this Hypercompact logo has evolved from it’s first inception on Dribbble as well.

hypercompact from Igor Ginzburg on Vimeo.

Me and my friend Evgeny Skidanov are really inspired by the awesome logotype which has been developed by Morgan Allan Knutson (http://dribbble.com/shots/413803-Get-your-wings). And we could not to resist to create own animated version of the logo to apply 3D and motion effects and to show it in a slightly different perspective. Because we just love to create various animated 3D logotypes with a maniac attention to each pixel. By the way this version of the logo can be used not only in the video presentations but also on the website as animated gif.

I hope you enjoy our version of the logo, we have made it just for fun in our spare time. Criticism and comments are very welcome :)

Brand: HYPERCOMPACT
2D logotype developing: Morgan Allan Knutson
3D modeling and visualization: Evgeny Skidanov
Animation and composting: Igor Ginzburg
Sound design: Yuiry Ginzburg

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Building A City With Cold Metal Type By David B Smith surely has to be one of THE most imaginative typographic and letterpress projects I have seen ever.

Having the realistion that old cold metal type, used in the creation of letterpress printing, could be arranged and fashioned to build a wonderfully realistic city scape must have been a wonderful Eureka moment for David.

Would absolutely love to see this up close.

From Letterology:“Among his contemporary works on display, Type City is Jang’s sprawling metalopolis seaport made of tall lead type buildings and boulevards bisecting the city into a topographic and typographic landscape. With the patience of a skilled hand typesetter, he set the tall buildings of metal type upright so they are capped with individual letters. Long lead piers stretch out to the sea, and empty city blocks and sidewalks of spacing material frame the city center.”

K Found on Letterology

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So I have coined a phrase, “Brand Mesh-Ups”, for the fun Indifferenti branding project by Tommaso Guerra.

Tommaso has taken competing brands and meshes them together. Love the manor in which Tommaso has presented his Indifferenti brand logos which are engraved on Plexiglas.

If you like these then you may also like my own Brand Reversions project which took competing brands and then created a brand hybrid.

K Found on Quipsologies

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We have seen quite a number of these fine line cross with 4 letters logo design of late. This particular logo design trend even made it to the Hipster Branding Project, but Tom Jaeger certainly adds a new twist to this simple design.

Not sure I am a fan of the use of these seemingly random shapes being used to help make the logo stand out more: remove these random ‘relief’ shapes and you end up with a rotated cross and 4 letters again, but that aside the whole identity system is super polished.

K Found on Graphic Exchange

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Read Another 4 Letters & Cross Logo With A Twist By Tom Jaeger on imjustcreative - logo & brand identity design portfolio and blog.

This is quick summary of Gravity Forms which I use to create my Logo Design Brief Form as well as providing you with a PDF template of it for you to download.

I have previously posted a few articles detailing how I go about collecting information for the logo design brief. In these earlier dark dark days I relied extensively on Google Doc’s to provide the means to display and collect this crucial information, and then send it back to me. So very dark.

There are a number of issues that bothered me using Google Doc’s. The main one was that it meant the client having to leave my website in order to visit the link to the external Google document which was bad. So very bad.

There was also the fact that it was hard to really make it look half decent as well as the collected information being a real pig to read, view, collect in a readable manort. If you then received confirmation on your particular mobile device—something that frequently happened—that a client had filled in the form, then I think it’s fair to say you would be a little stuck in trying to view said form on your mobile device.

In general Google Doc’s was not best suited for performing the mission of displaying, collecting and viewing this client brief.

Introducing Gravity Forms

My search to find an internal solution lead me to Gravity Forms which can also work alongside WordPress as a plug-in.

I enlisted the technical help of my elf developer, who can be summoned by calling Mr Shane—every designer needs their own Elf Developer, to move the data from Google Doc’s to Gravity Forms. In hindsight it was something that I could have done, but I did get overwhelmed with the choices of CSS styling, and my brain blew up. Mr Shane ‘Elf’ Hudson was their to wipe the sticky pieces of brain slop.

If you are looking for a method to collect this vital client information, and have tried other external options, then I might suggest you give Gravity Forms a try. It certainly can be a beast of a software application, and is certainly has potential to be a very detailed and powerful data collection system, but in the end it proved simple to create my own internal Logo Design Brief Form.

I also use Gravity Forms to create a simple Contact form on my Contact page.

One of the best aspects of Gravity Forms is that when a client now fills in the form a full copy is emailed to me in a easy-to-view format (below). This email is well presented and comes with all the relevant section titles, whereas Google Doc’s just sent the actual filled in information without the headers.

I have divided my own Logo Design Brief Form into 5 separate pages to make the form more manageable as to have it all on one page is a little daunting; another area that Google Doc’s fails at.

When you have created your form you can then easily insert into your WordPress page/post by means new icon that appears in your post edit box which drops in a single short-code. It’s just so flipping useful.

Visual confirmation is also another area that Gravity Forms kicks ass. You have full control over who and how someone is notified that they have filled in a form. Simple and obvious things, but it’s all here.

There are far too many aspects of Gravity Forms for me to go in into detail, but rest assured I am incredibly chuffed with the power, flexibility and ease that Gravity Forms now provides.

There are a few licensing options: I opted for the Personal Licence which costs around $39.00, and you can see a full list of Full Features if you are interested. There is also a Gravity Forms Demo for those curious types who don’t like commitment.

Introducing My Logo Design Form Template

I am still in the process of tweaking the logo design form in terms of wording and design, but you can see the working form over on the Hire Me page.

In order to see all the pages you would ordinarily have to fill in the form as many fields are ‘required’, but I have especially created, just for you, a PDF of each page with 5 in total.

Now you can see quickly how I have set-up this logo design form as well as the various drop-down menu’s, fields and questions in case you are looking for some help creating your own logo design brief form.

Please feel free to download these PDF’s and use them as a template as you see fit. What’s mine, is yours. :)

Download my Logo Design Brief Form in PDF

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Read How I Create A Logo Design Brief Using Gravity Forms & Template on imjustcreative - logo & brand identity design portfolio and blog.

Prepare yourself for a dazzling hair style by the leather jacket clad scarf wearing presenter—I would love to know what this presenter does now, and would love to see if he still has any hair. This video shows the way of a creative agency before pretty much everything we take for granted in our professional lives now.

From YouTube: Walter Landor, founder of Landor Associates, was interviewed by a journalist from KPIX (CBS) for the television show Evening Magazine. Sitting on the deck of the Klamath ferryboat (former headquarters of Landor Associates), with the San Francisco Bay in the background, Walter talks about the art of branding, working with clients, and even a little about himself. This historic video captures the magic of the man and provides a glimpse inside one of the most unusual office settings around.

K Found on Branding/Identity/Design

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The initial design I said I would offer up for download now looks quite different to what I am using here on imjustcreative, but it is very similar to what I am still using over on Logo Stack .

The other reason for the delay is that the CSS and back-end code is pretty much all-over-the-place. Due to almost daily tweaks and changes which means it has been impossible to sit down and create an up-to-date theme with cleaned up code for purpose of making available as a WordPress Theme Download.

I am still tweaking imjustcreative which means for the foreseeable future I don’t see a point where we can create a finalised and polished version with clean code. However, I do know that many of you are still expressing an interest in getting your hands on whatever I make available even if it’s messy and dirty under-the-bonnet.

Alpha Release

With that in mind I have now decided to make available the WordPress Responsive Portfolio theme that is currently used on Logo Stack (above).

This is the raw and dirty Alpha release which means it’s not at all how I would like to eventually release the theme, but will provide you with something to get your fingers dirty on.

It should make a reasonable portfolio theme for you if you can spend some time polishing up the code and cleaning up the dirty edges.

It’s far from perfect, and there are far better ‘proper’ responsive themes out there, but it may be useful as a start.

Licence

I still plan to release a cleaned up version of the Logo Stack theme as well as the theme that I use here on imjustcreative. Until that moment you are free to do what you like with this version, but I do ask that you just keep the small link back to me in the footer. I would like to track the general usage of this theme so I can work out how much work to put in the preparation of the main theme with cleaned up code.

You are welcome to make this credit text smaller and style it how you wish, but please keep it somewhere visible on every page.

A Few Notes

The Logo Stack theme is set-up with one index.php page (above) and single.php page which shows the individual posts. The index.php displays the Featured Post Image as you can see above and links back to the single.php.

You can alter how many images display on the home page. At the moment I have 3 rows with 3 columns, but you could have 2 rows with 10 columns, 4 rows and 20 columns etc. You could also remove the sidebar if you want a full width portfolio page. The screenshot below shows (red dot) the number to change how many rows. If you want 4 rows then change 3 to 4 etc.

To change the amount of columns you need to change how many posts display in WordPress DashBoard:- Settings:- Reading Settings.

The sidebar is currently hard-coded with the drop-down category and tag menus, but does have the Widget code placed at the end of sidebar.php. If you want to place widgets you can and these will display at the bottom, or you can remove the drop-down code so that the widgets appear top of the side-bar.

I have removed the social share buttons found end of posts in single.php, but I have left space for you to add you own with a comment, “Insert Social Share Code”. There is room to add 4 regular share buttons as below:

Obviously change the personal and contact information in the footer and anywhere else you might find it.

The theme is partially responsive in that it works reasonable well on iPhone, but is not yet fully optimised for tablet formats.

You’ll likely have to play around with things like search.php, archives.php etc as these are still not refined even on the Logo Stack theme currently in use.

Comes With NO Support

This theme is provided as is with no technical help or support. I can’t stress enough how untidy the back-end code is so if you are not familiar with CSS, HTML and PHP you may struggle.

Based On

This responsive WordPress theme is based on the framework called Foundation, developed by Zurb. This framework was then developed into a barebones WordPress theme by https://github.com/drewsymo/Foundation.

If you need technical information on how the responsive side works then head over to Zurb for full documentation.

You can read more on my own experiences with the above: http://imjustcreative.co.uk/minimal-responsive-wordpress-theme/

Additional Development

Additional code development has been kindly provided Shane Hudson who is currently working on the Beta release of this imjustcreative (Logo Stack) WordPress theme. The Beta release will gave much cleaner CSS and PHP as well as more code comments and a generally nicer looking back-end to play with.

Shane is tasked with cleaning up all my messy coding. Anything messy or unbelievably shit looking will be down to me and not Shane.

Download

Download imjustcreative (Logo Stack) WordPress Theme

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Read Alpha Release: The imjustcreative Responsive Portfolio WordPress Theme on imjustcreative - logo & brand identity design portfolio and blog.

I was drawn to the work of Sasha Prood by way of DoobyBrain which initially showed some of the amazing watercolour typography work, but I then noticed on Sasha’s portfolio the intricate watercolour logo work.

La Buena Foods (above) is particularly beautiful. Hiring Sasha Prood would be one way to guarantee a level of uniqueness not generally found in pure digitally created identity design.

K See more of her work over on: http://www.sashaprood.com

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Read Watercolor Typography & Logos by Sasha Prood on imjustcreative - logo & brand identity design portfolio and blog.