On www.logobook.co.uk, this months book of the month is logo design Now! Author Julius Wiedemann, has produced a good book with load of interesting case histories. One I was particularly interested to read about was a chapter on the relaunch of the Mini. Designed originally by British designer Sir Alec Isigonis, this car has become an icon of the 60’s along with Beatles, Twiggy and the Union Jack.

It also has 9 categories showing pages of logo designs, some of which are inspirational. It comes with a handy elastic band to mark your page. Also a reasonable size to slip into your briefcase should you be looking for diversions on the train home.

Actually one of this things I liked most about this book it the was the designer speak any ad man would be proud of!

‘ The MINI typeface, which developed out of the available typeface, also contributes to an original and consistent sharpening of the brand image’.

What they mean is ‘Good old Arial or was is Helvetica, can’t beat them’.

Do feel free to comment on our book of the month, Logo Design Now! We would be pleased to receive your comments.

At LogoPro, we recognise the importance of looking after our customers. We always respond within 48 hours, often sooner, and work hard at understanding their requirements. Although most of our communication is via email, it is still possible to build an informal and friendly relationship, although we consider carefully what we write in our emails, it is so easy to be misunderstood! There was an occasion where I thought I was being amusingly cheeky - the client took exception, obviously thinking I was just plain rude!

Because of our excellent designers and our caring attitude, many of our clients return again and again. We have every file ever created by our designers, going back to December 2001.

FineLine Communications, LogoPro’s first customer ever, can be confidant that we can help them with their logo design, stationery design or other graphic design needs. This logo was designed by Peter Lock in December 2001. You can see this logo on FineLine’s website, www.finelinecom.co.uk.

We would be pleased to receive feedback on this article. Or email us via our contact us page.

In the past LogoPro have had a minimal amount of contact with clients, apart from email, working on the premise that both their time and ours is a valuable resource, not to be wasted. We were mistaken!

We decided to take a closer look at our service and compared it to our competitors. One of the ways we have done this is to ask our clients for their opinion. Surprisingly clients seems to feel nurtured, not pestered, by our request and have obviously taken care to provide us with detailed answers to our short questionnaire. It seems to be an untapped mine of information, giving us the opportunity to provide a better service.

We have found that our clients want to have some verbal contact sometime during the process, because of this we have had a change of approach. Instead of actively discouraging phone calls, we have taken the decision to provide a freephone number for clients and potential customers to talk to us.

So if you are interested in our online logo design service, feel free to call us on 0800 170 1060 or if you are happier at the keyboard, do leave your comment here or email us via our contact us page.

Yesterday was Lego’s 50th birthday and in honour of the occasion Google had a Lego logo design on their home page. The special anniversary logo’s, known as Google Doodles, are created by Dennis Gwang a Google Webmaster. You can see other doodles at www.google.co.uk/doodle4google/doodler.htm

Google inventors Larry Page and Sergey Brin have a strong affection for Lego. In 1996, as students developing what became Google, they used Lego to house 10 disk drives, giving them a massive 40 Gbytes of diskspace to test their PageRank algorithum, the basis for a search engine that checked links to determine a website’s importance.

At LogoPro we choose to use CorelDraw for our vector graphic designs. Our first ideas our roughed out using both a good old 2B pencil and sketch book and CorelDraw. We may develop a design using Photoshop, there are many things you just cannot do in CorelDraw that Photoshop is outstanding for, like metallic effects on a font or shape used to enhance a logo design.

So we are excited to see that a new edition is due out next month, CorelDraw X4. One of the new features is live text formatting, where you can preview options on font, font size and alignment.

CorelDraw now integrates with WhatTheFont, a brilliant tool for identifying a font from even the worst low resolution image. Occasionally a client will send us a file showing us a font they have used in the past or an example of a font they like, so being able to identify a font this way saves hours of leg work.

There are many other features, well another 48 according to the blurb! We are looking forward to upgrading when it comes out on the 12th February 2008.

If you have any thoughts on CorelDraw vs Illustrator, we would be very interested to hear your views.

Another of our favourite illustrative logo designs can be seen daily around South West London. Kappy is a company that provides a unique service, they care for animals in a similar way to conventional paramedics, using a purpose built ambulance, fully equipped with equipment needed by their veterinary surgeons.

The image above shows the final Kappy company logo design, it also shows the original inspiration for the dalmatian illustration, a beautiful dog called Dilly, who owns one of our graphic designers.

In our logo portfolio, you can see more animal and pet logo designs by looking in the specific categories. If you want more information, do leave a comment on this blog, or send an email via our contact us page.

Sometimes we produce illustrative logos, a logo with a visual representation that corresponds with the name on our logo design. A client may send an image to our contact us facility, which shows an important aspect of their business.

Standing Pretty is a company that make practical hat stands for hire predominantly at weddings but also christenings, garden parties and other important events. The stands are an unusual solution for guests to leave their hats during the occasion.

Our logo designer turned a fairly clear, but mundane photograph into a beautiful illustration of a Standing Pretty hat stand, with a hat to demonstrate it’s purpose clearly.

Watch our blog for other examples of illustrative logo design.

One of the ways we approach a new project is to see if it would be appropriate to change a letter in a title to conveys the business or product, this can produce a unique and memorable logo.

A great example in our logo design portfolio is Yellowstone Recruitment. In this logo the font used is Chiller, a font designed by Australian, Andrew Smith in 1995. Described as a chaotic, reckless fun font, it is easily readable and works wonderfully well in this example.

Another LogoPro logo which shows this concept well was a design for a children’s shoe shop, Lillifoot. They suggested the use of toes as a possible image, after showing Lillifoot 6 different concepts (as shown on our client page, http://www.logopro.co.uk/logo-design-client-lillifoot.htm) they fell in love with one of the first designs and although we presented them with several variations on the design, they stuck with the original concept. The font used in this example is OzHandicraft BT, designed in 1991 by Oswald Bruce Cooper and George Ryan.

If you have any comments on these logos, or can send us your own examples of this kind of logo, we would be pleased to show them on our logo design blog. Please send them via our contact us page.

We were interested to see that Google has developed a rival to Wikipedia. Research is a major part of our job as a logo designer, for example, finding information on terms used in a client’s design brief.

Here is an extract from a brief from our client, Geo Consulting:

“Work primarily in the field of development and production geology (ie concerned with extracting hydrocarbons out of the ground) as opposed to exploration (which is finding oil/gas in the ground).
Particular specialities are 1) ‘risking’ of oil and gas volumes (involves probabalistic calculations using Monte Carlo techniques) and 2) interpretation of dipmeter/image logs (electronic equipment lowered down a drill-hole to recorder physical properties of the rocks/fluids - in this case structural information.”

Wikipedia was a mine of information (excuse the pun) on hydrocarbons, Monte Carlo method, dipmeter, geology generally …

Google’s new site is called Knol (meaning unit of knowledge). Unlike Wikipedia which has user-generated information on almost everything under the sun, Google plan to name people who contribute by publishing their profile with each entry. Google believe that knowing who wrote an article will help users make better use of the information, presumably they mean accountable. Also it differs in that anyone can contribute to any article on Wikipedia, on Knol, an article will be written by a single author and other users can edit it only with permission from the author. The other major difference is that Knol will have advertising running alongside the articles, the authors will have the power to allow advertisements to appear on their knols or not, and that if they give permission, they will receive commission.

Although Wikipedia is open to abuse, it is hard to believe that as an encyclopedia, it could be usurped by a commercial version with such a strong emphasis on financial success.

We would be pleased to hear your views on this article via the comment box below or send us an email via our contact us page.

Occasionally we have to hand draw a title for a company logo design. We have such a large choice of script fonts that we rarely have to create our own, although we do often modify existing fonts to fit our own requirements. When a type designer is working on a new font, they needs to make sure the new design functions well in many different aspects, this is as important as making a unique type face with visual appeal. The amount of time and energy spent in designing a new font, ironing out it’s problems and presenting the final finished font to the market is a profession in it’s own right.

‘Kin’ethics was designed by LogoPro in 2002 and can still be seen on www.ethicalcorp.com. An extract from the design brief explains the meaning behind this logo “‘Kin’Ethics. Meaning: Lit: An expletive to show the exasperation, frustration, infuriation and inconvenience felt by those involved with business ethics. In essence, through its products and services it offers a lighter way to deal with the paradoxes, joys, pain and complexity of business ethics and social responsibility.”

Bee-Wise logo design was for a client who designed and printed an education magazine about anti bullying, stranger danger, drug and alcohol misuse. To help identify with kids and their issues they chose a design based on graffiti art.

Do feel free to comment on any of the logo designs shown in these articles. Or if you have any relevant examples of your own, do email them to us via our contact us page.