Logo Design RoundUp Part 12 – How Designers Promote & Brand Themselves

This is Part 12 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.



imjustcreative-logo design

This is Part 12 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.

You can see how I designed my own logo in this post : Bastardizing Helvetica for the ImJustCreative Logo Design

If you want to be part of this logo design series, then details can be found at the bottom of this post.

What this collection is not

This is not a competition, it’s not a best of, it’s not a who has the best logo, it’s not a collection of logos that I have chosen. They are logos supplied by those that wanted to be part of this post. And a huge thank you to everyone who has submitted.

This series will go on indefinitely, all the time there are designers prepared to submit their logo designs. If you have submitted recently, but your logo is not included in this post, don’t worry, it will be in the next one. I keep each post limited to around 12 logos per post, on a first come first served type of basis.

The logo submissions are displayed in alphabetical order, so no favoritism on my part here. :)

Logo Roundup – Part 12

An1ken-logo-design

Jacques van Heerden – An1ken – Digital Illustration and Design – http://an1ken.net

Inspiration for the logo started back in 2007 when I needed something simple and elegant to trademark my work with thus leading to my previous logo design which I used for quite some time.

The end of 2008 I got tired of the way the logo looked and started brainstorming on some new ideas and doing quite the bit of research. It was only in February 2009 after contemplating and sitting down for hours on end with hundreds of mockups that I came up with the final that you see above.

Its Smooth, Elegant, easy on the eyes and looks damn good. An1ken which has the meaning to me ( Any 1 can ) finally got the logo up by the end of February and haven’t looked back since. It inspires me every time I look at it, I hope it does the same for you.

Boiled!-logo-design

‘Maarten van den Berg – Boiled! – Freelance designer | illustrator – http://boiled.nl

When I started in 2003 I got the name, because I wanted to be able to use it as an adjective for different things. For instance: Boiled! T-shirts or Boiled! Wallpapers. You can also use it like: “You have been Boiled!”.  My first priority, of course, was getting a logo that could hold it’s own for quite a few years.

Like a lot of other designer, I presume, I am my own worst client. It was hard to really get to a design that I wasn’t bored with the next day. When I finally got the fonts right I decided on the color and put it away for a few days. When I came back to it I was still liking the feel, so I stuck with it.

The first version was just a red rectangle, with rounded corners and the Boiled! font in white in the middle. That would be my base of design, now I can alter it over time without having to completely redesigning the whole thing and maintaining the same feel. But as times change, so do a designers preferences and the evolution of a logo reflects that. I keep the liberty to update my logo and not get bored with it. So far I am still happy with it, I get really wonderful reactions, so I guess this version will be around for a while.

brandjoe-logo-design

Joe Edwards – BrandJoe – Web & Graphic Designer – http://brandjoe.com

This was very much as self branding, self promotion process and I really wanted to focus my design on my interests in my life. So what are the interests in my life?

  • Geekery, which covers social media, computing and gadgets
  • Business, I really enjoy applying my skill sets to solve business needs particularly in the marketing environment
  • Basketball, as I’ve already mentioned
  • Design, has been passion of mine from a very early age

Music, have always had a keen interest in music, especially funky hiphop, motown, blues funk and soul (MOBO) although I do not just listen to this type of music and in my younger years enjoyed DJ’ing with friends such a DJ Tigerstyle 3xWorld Champ. It was actually you that helped inspire my design please read the blog post – http://www.brandjoe.com/blogsite/?p=167 but this was the initial thoughts.

brandwell-logo-design

Marwan Salfiti – Brandwell Creative – Branding and Web Development – http://brandwellcreative.com/

This logo I am submitting to you really embodies my esthetic as a designer. When I came up with the name for my company, I already knew in my head what my image would look like. So, when I set out to create a mark, I already knew that it would be heavily type based.

These days, there are so many tremendous type designers out there and some simply beautiful typefaces. There are almost too many choices, in my honest opinion. So, after some thorough thought, I decided to use my good old friend Helvetica. When I first started design, I became infatuated with Swiss style design and designers like Josef Muller Brockmann and Helvetica was simply love at first site.

But because Helvetica is so commonly used, I really wanted to try and display it with my own touch. You will notice that in my mark, I have made some adjustments to characters, relationships, as well as spacing. I did not want to destroy the original face, but rather compliment it’s beauty to display my true message, “BrandWell”.

brighttribe-logo-design

Bright Tribe – Brian Dempsey, President – http://brighttribe.com

After co-founding a traditional interactive agency with all of our services under one roof and a few talented people “at the top,” I started Bright Tribe with the goal of bringing together brightest individuals and companies with a single goal – to provide top notch brand/identity, creative, content, technology and online marketing solutions. Thus, the name “Bright Tribe” communicates a collaboration of experts – a bringing together of thought leaders from a variety of supporting disciplines.

The plumes are a play on both the words “bright” and “tribe” and can be fire or features.  We’ve carried this same idea in the dots over the i’s with the arrows.  The color pallet is also vibrant, displaying a diversity of related and complimentary colors, similar to our business model.

And we have also been deliberate about the double alliteration in the name and tagline – “Bright Tribe” and “Smart Marketing.”  Our clients frequently refer to our “tribe” of partners, reinforcing our brand in their own vocabulary.

eagleimagery-logo-design

Mark Ballantyne – Eagle Imagery™ Logo Designer – http://eagleimagery.co.uk

The logo I wanted for my business had to have impact – and have impact in spades.  After all, logo design is what I do and if my own isn’t memorable what hope would my clients have for theirs?

Contrary to some extremely ignorant comments I’ve had over the years (albeit just three!) the logo is not the Third Reich Eagle (go have a look)!  The only similarity is in the wing tips (if you’re being really pedantic).  If people think it is, well that’s just their TV-influenced ignorance failing them.

The Eagle design was inspired by a fair few things; most notably the design and, importantly, the ethos of the ancient imperial eagles of central and eastern Europe.  Added to that, some influences by North and South American Indian/Incan design and there you have it.  The strictly angular nature of the Eagle is just a personal influence.  I have a penchant for sharp, orderly, clean lines.  It took four years to perfect the design until I was happy with it.

Why an Eagle?  I consider eagles to be awe-inspiring, powerful creatures at the top of the food chain.  The design serves, for me, as a maxim, a mission statement and aspiration.

This feature here is actually almost a world debut for the entire design.  It’s been in use for ten years or more – and I actually have it tattooed – but I rarely if ever use it in it’s entirety.  Instead, I just use the head and part of the left wing as an identifier on my site and materials.  Despite its complexity, it reduces extremely well and has become a versatile part of my branding process.

I feel I’ve achieved a certain degree of ‘brand recognition’ with the Eagle in the UK.  For market research purposes, I sometimes ask people in my business circles (non-designers) to recall and describe a designers’ logo – the only one they can ever recall is mine so it must be working!

haberdashdesign-logo-design-rev

Anthony Rizzo – Haberdash Design LLC – http://haberdashdesign.com/

The haberdasher is a person who sold small articles of clothing and I vaguely compare that to design and its modern turnaround times with emphasis on the dash. I added the umlaut for character and another vague interpretation of buttons linking to the origin. We work primarily with corporate identity, branding, marketing and promotional design in print and web for small to medium businesses in the New York/New Jersey area.

iZINER-logo-design

Gary Stephen Callaghan – iZINER – Web Designer – http://iziner.com

iZINER is a re brand of my old company GcStudios, the reason for the re brand was really i got bored with the old name and wanted a change of style and a much snappier name. It took me a while to actually come up with the name iZINER, as you can probably see it basically stands for I Design. It’s simple and easy to remember, much like the way I like my designs to be.

I choose the greyish colour because I had already planned out the colour of my website redesign so it fitted in perfectly obviously i have a few other colours of the logo saved so that it can be used on different backgrounds. The main colours are grey black and a light blue which is one of my favorite colours.  The reason behind it being shaped into a pencil is because i recently started drawing a lot especially web designs when I’m bored just start scribbling down storyboard ideas for new designs, so I thought I would show this by creating my logo in a typography pencil shape.

The whole iZINER type and pecil end where created using Illustrators pen tool.

origindesignhouse-logo-design

Derek Land – Origin Design House – Creative Director – http://origindesignhouse.com

Origin primarily does web design, but my design experience is steeped in graphic art, which I think comes through when I look back on the design process for the logo. It’s a very “design theory”-type of logo, even though it looks so simple. We had worked up at least twelve different – some radically different – logos, but liked the simplicity of this one. Not to get too long-winded, but here’s a bit of the reasoning behind this one based on our process and team ideas.

Origin has used an ink blotch, in some fashion, in connection with our identity for several years. I liked the idea of the ink blotch in part because it’s a very organic shape but also because the free-form and sense of creativity it carries. Ink blotches are typical of an artist’s work in progress – a very hands-on, creative-person type of idea but not so blatant and in-your-face. The ink blotch also isn’t uptight and stuffy at all, which makes people a bit easier about talking to us.

The layout was based on several ideas. We had sampled the logo on the opposite side (justified left) of the type as well as centered above it. In the end, we chose the right justification for the logo because it strongly resembles an asterisk – which usually means there’s a fact or basis in small print at the bottom. This “asterisk hint” works well because it adds a basis and factual, serious nature to the logo without actually coming out and saying it up front. In fact, this works even better when the logo is small because the detail of the ink blotch becomes less evident and more closely resembles a real asterisk (hardly ever, though, do we reproduce the logo smaller than 16pt). In the end, the suggestion of an asterisk and the creativity of an ink blotch worked very well together.

The thin, sans-serif typeface (we had tossed around Kozuka Gothic and Helvetica Neue before going with Vegur Extra Light) contrasts the carefree ink blotch by being business like and professional. The typeface isn’t silly at all; it compliments nicely the ‘asterisk’ suggestion of the ink blotch. We had mocked the logo design with capitalization and then one with all lower case, but the former looked too “shout-y” and the latter didn’t look serious enough and was a bit harder to read at a glance given the name has so many round characters (o, e, a, even the lowercase g).

We use one colours, with the black being changed white on a dark background and the “Origin Blue” we’ve used for years. However, the logo will work equally well in black and white, given the consideration we gave to the legibility of the typeface.

pixel8-logo-design

Erik Ford – pixel8 – Head Honcho / Design Freak – http://wearepixel8.com

When my business partner and I decided on the name for our company, I knew immediately that I wanted a type based logo that was incredibly clean, minimal and simple. I didn’t want a lot of bells and whistles or an extravagant logo mark. If it was going to have a mark at all, it would be incorporated into type itself. In fact, my original sketches didn’t even have a mark. It wasn’t until I was on to my 20th iteration did I stumble upon the idea to transform the “x” into a person with the pixel as the head. My partner loved the idea at that point but I was still stubbornly fighting it tooth and nail.

But there was something intriguing about the concept, so I decided to flesh it out a bit more. The original sketch with the “x” mark featured rounded letter forms. I decided to drop that idea and make all of the letters block in shape. This gave the logo a linear look that I found appealing and, more importantly, it conveyed the essence of our company: modern and forward thinking. Plus, the straight angles created by the letter forms conveys a strength while the “x” shows our playful side. After that sketch, I feel in love with it. Sometimes these things do happen by complete accident.

Our name is obviously a direct play on the fact we are partly a graphic design house. But, we are also a marketing agency where people, and how they interact with our client’s brand, are central to everything we do. Hence, “Pixel Person” was born and added to the center of the logo. As for colors, I chose to work with only two because, again, simplicity was the rule.

readysetproject-logo-design

Ryan Gensel – Ready Set Project – Creativity Project Consultant – http://ryangensel.blogspot.com

Managing creative projects is hectic.  An individual in the role of Project Manager is required to understand the scope of the endeavor and the capabilities of the resources, human or otherwise.  I wanted to put Vitruvian Man in the place of a Project Manager, chasing documents, refining ideas, but always moving towards “form.”  I used a grid and the divine ratio to compose, and the “floating documents” are the negative space of recursive arcs.  Without a briefcase the silhouette looks generic, but with a simple shape, our minds connect the business “busy-ness” related to the professional archetype.

“Ready Set Project”, when dissected is an ironic phrase to encapsulate the services of a planning consultant, since the idea of “Ready Set Go” implies an initial pause before a leap.  Projects are not performed in a vacuum, however our minds again simplify things during transition, from thought to action.  Project planning is a discipline, not to be turned off or on, but to be a mindset of continual performance and improvement.

The traditional divine ratio is embedded into our minds, and is a repeated pattern throughout existence.  However, “media” is inherently fluid, but in context instantiates itself in “format” or “shape.”  Integrating the universal pattern, the logo fits in any media, however it’s perfect for none.  The best logo is someone else’s, because what’s been designed today, will have a different meaning tomorrow.

RLQcreative-logo-design

Ryan Littman-Quinn – RLQcreative – Marketing & Freelance Designer – http://rlqcreative.com

I approached the design of my portfolio site with a simple philosophy in mind: simple, clean, and grayscale (with the obvious exception of my art).

I designed my logo with this same philosophy in mind.  It is only a single shade of dark gray and while there is something a bit ‘off’ about the L (a subtle nod to my unique way of thinking/perceiving), the logo as a whole is balanced in terms of spacing and lining up element thresholds, which keeps it clean.

As mentioned before, throughout my whole site the only colors that appear are from my art.  I did not want to constrict my personal creative brand to a particular color scheme or texture/pattern.  I feel that this relationship between my simple, grayscale logo/brand and artwork is powerful.  Not only does the contrast highlight the color and essence of my art, but it makes a statement about my creative range and potential.

ronaldtroyer-logo-design

Ronald Troyer – Web & Graphic Designer – http://ronaldtroyer.com

This logo was created with a strong forethought on implementing my sense of design.In design, I believe the most beautiful creations implement a sense of minimalism. The four boxes are representative of my basic tenants of design. A good design should: fulfill a purpose, be functional, not complicate itself, and leave a lasting impression.

These were, however, implemented in more than just the logo design. In the design of my website, ronaldtroyer.com,  the boxes were used as an experimental form of navigation.

The typeface is Myriad Pro, bold and normal. The striking thing about Myriad is in it’s simplicity and versatility. I can be used for both headlines, and body copy. I believe the reason I had Ronald be bold and not the common path of identifying yourself by last name, and therefore emphasizing it, was due to the community I lived in at the time of design. There were many ‘Troyer’ families, and yet I wasn’t related to any of them, and so I decided to differentiate myself based on my first name.

Oh well. I hope you like the logo as much as I loved to design it.

End of Part 12 – Submit Your Own Logo

If you want to add your own logo to forthcoming versions of this post, then check out this post ‘I want your creative business logo for forthcoming post’.

If you do submit a logo, then please ensure you submit a few paragraphs about how the logo came into being etc. Without this information I can’t add your logo.

Flickr Group Pool

I have recently started posting all previous submitted logo’s to a Flickr Pool called ‘Designers Brands & Logos‘ to further max the self promotion for you guys.

Woop.