The first step in any logo design is finding out what the client wants to accomplish with their company. What are they doing? Who do they feel would benefit the most from their products or services? David filled out a questionnaire for me addressing these points and more, which allowed me to start my process:

Research.

DCo Solutions identified with support.com as a main competitor. Obviously, support.com is very successful and they’ve got a few things working right. I spent a good 20 minutes picking through their website seeing how brand affected my experience with them: how were colors, shapes, and fonts used? Were there any specific icons or marks that helped me identify where I was at? From there, some more searching across the internet turned up other support service companies, and I picked up on a few trends: Web 2.0, sans serif typefaces, and icons picked out of the blue.

Designing Concepts

I hit the drawing board and started to sketch out some ideas for how I felt DCo Solutions could break the mold and stand out. I experimented in particular around a shield shape (which was a bold move, as a shield can be associated with the anti-virus niche) to bring the idea that we’re defending against computer problems. Other concepts did go down the simple, clean and bold look as well.

Through the process of elimination, David decided to go with the bottom center logo– a twist I put on the shield with rounded edges and a slightly twisted perspective to give the logo an edgy dynamic. While he liked the logo, he still wasn’t set on the typeface, so we went ahead with a couple of experiments.

I kept the first typeface, which was House Gothic. Based off of his suggestions, I also tried Calibri, and for fun tossed DIN Engschrift in as another option, giving him three choices to compare. In the end, we ended up going with the middle (Calibri) logo.

Adding Color

For me, adding color is always the fun part– almost more than designing the logo. It’s the punch that adds the final dash of flavor and completes the look. So for this, I decided to have some fun. I prepared 8 different choices to look through (which was overwhelming) but I felt they were strong choices. From the 8, we whittled the list down to 4 where we really started to look closer at each in coming to a final decision.

David ended up deciding to stick along the same colors he used to promote his website to this point, and went with the darker blue. While I personally leaned toward the orange (it did look bright!), I knew that overall he most likely would stick with the colors he had promoted with all along. And it’s a good way to go! For a young company, keeping as many elements consistent as you can until you establish recognition will help you out in the long run landing new clients and keeping exisiting ones!

In part three, I wrap things up and let David weigh in with his thoughts on the process, and how he’s moving forward with the new look.

I’ll be covering the three parts of my experience: picking my client, my experience working with a client on free time, and a small interview with the company I chose.

The Power of Social Media

For some time now, I’ve been lurking around reddit.com, a social news website that has one of the most unique yet awesome personalities of any social media website I know. Members not only have the option to submit news or links to preset categories, but reddit goes one step farther by also allowing the creation of new categories (or subreddits), allowing the site to take a life of its own. And one that caught my eye was the /r/Favors subreddit. The idea behind /r/Favors, is that members can come together to ask for something, or offer their services to those who might need it.

I was really taken by the favors offered: things from help with homework to helping people learn new languages. And as I scrolled through the list, an idea struck: I’ve seen many websites and businesses out there that just had flat-out terrible looking logos. I know in some cases, the client drives design into the ground, but in other cases the budget simply isn’t there to create something professional looking. With this in mind, I set up a favor: a free logo, with no strings attached. It was apparently a hit, as I was bombarded with everyone and their mother telling me why they deserved to be chosen.

Picking the Client

The old logo for DCo Solutions

Quite often in design, this goes the other way around: the client finds you. So it’s a bit weird when the tables turn and you get to pick the client. I ended up going with David, the owner of DCo Solutions. The premise behind DCo Solutions is creating service-based support services for those who need help with their computer. What sets them apart is the ability to do remote and on-site service. But his logo clearly wasn’t helping him stand out. So after a small set of questions, we were off to help re-brand DCo.

In part two of this series, I’ll be talking about how we went about the design process and started to put together a new look for DCo Solutions to help bring them to the forefront of the support service industry!

Inkscape has seen some enhancements over the past few releases which have been able to better equip artists with the tools necessary to create photo-realistic vector work. (via Inkscape)

The first one I’d like to pick on is my personal favorite: Inkscape. It’s a vector-based program like Illustrator that really does an outstanding job considering that Inkscape is only at version 0.47.

My first experience with Inkscape actually came in college while I was at my on-campus job. I was given the task of creating a small poster to promote an upcoming event. Since I was working in an office, I really didn’t have the time or access to much and our budget certainly didn’t allow for a $2,000 software price tag. So with the help of Google, I wound up finding Inkscape. After spending about 15 minutes figuring out the quirks, I was able to complete the project and give our office something that, for the first time, wasn’t designed in a Word document.

Yes, my first design ever created in Inkscape…

While it wasn’t 100% pretty, I was immediately impressed with the results and continued to mess around with its different features. You can’t expect to do crazy things like 3D, but with a bit of patience it’s got me out of a jam more than once. I’m not the kind of artist that can go and create a beautiful photo-realistic model like the sweet one I nicked off the Inkscape site, but it is nice to be able to pop off a quick logo idea, or in the case of my school, a career fair poster.

There are a few things that still hold me back from using Inkscape more often, unfortunately. A big part of my working files are either saved in or delievered to me as Adobe EPS files– something that is still unable to be opened or imported. I’m also still spoiled by a few fun things in Illustrator, including the 3D effects, ability to create charts, and that I can navigate the interface and swipe keyboard commands without a second thought. While Inkscape provides some flexibility, it still leaves me waiting for the next release and its new bling.

But, if you’re up for experimenting with something new and something free, it’s worth the 30 seconds you’ll spend downloading. If anything, perhaps you can find a way to help push the project ahead by offering suggestions or feedback. And hopefully in another year, it can be a vector-app contender on my desktop.

Inkscape is currently at version 0.47 and is available at www.inkscape.org.

I’m going to show you how I will step through my process. There’s nothing “right” or “scientific”- and with a little practice, you can find yourself being hailed as the Font Hero around your office!

What you need to know

There are a few things you should familiar with before you try looking at fonts. It’s a huge waste of time to head over to your favorite font site and just start memorizing font names– but you should be familiar with the ones that have stood the test of time. I keep Chris Spooner’s article, 25 Classic Fonts That Will Last a Whole Design Career bookmarked, as I feel these fonts are a good base to start with. I’d also recommend that your design folder contain them as well, for many reasons.

The other thing you’ll want to study is font anatomy. It’s not nearly as exciting as your high school science anatomy project, but it’s essential. Make sure you know your ascenders from your descenders, and what someone might be referring to if they comment on the spur of a lower-case “a”. I personally prefer the Font Anatomy wallpaper from font.is for this one– it’s a very handy reference guide when its on my desktop.

So whats that font?

Arial in blue, Helvetica in magenta.

I’m going to keep picking on Arial and Helvetica, as I see the two interchanged quite a bit wherever I go. As you study typefaces, you’ll begin to find that every glyph has a very unique personality that is reflected throughout the entire typeface. As you find these quirks, identifying the font gets easier. For example, I know that Helvetica contains a lot of 90° angles in the terminals,  where Arial does not. This primary bit of knowledge usually is enough for me to figure out the difference between the two.

In addition to the 90° angles, there are a few other things I look at as well. There are rather large differences between the uppercase “R” and “M” to name a couple. (Side note: I personally, I find the “R” in Arial to be its most disgusting glyph, as the leg just limps off the character.) If you can spot these larger differences, you might find that you don’t have to inspect a font any closer to know what it is.

Build your type knowledge

When I began diving into type, I started out with Arial and Helvetica. There’s enough uses of both out there that you probably run into each more often everyday than you think. Once I felt comfortable enough pointing out the two, I started to add more to my repertoire. Gill Sans is a good next step, as is Akzidenz Grotesk (which is the typeface Helvetica was inspired from) and Univers. If you’re really getting into type, consider starting to keep track of where and how you’re seeing typefaces used. Good typography is about application, and each of these typefaces were created with a goal in mind. Interstate’s goal in life was to make highway signs easily readable– a place where a typeface like Helvetica doesn’t do well at all.

Race cars of today often sport detailed graphics to mimic the sponsor’s company and marketing campaign.

Auto racing is one of my most favorite pass times, and after getting our first computer at home growing up, my eye was on a racing game. Little did I know then that after successfully begging my parents to buy it, that game would put me on a journey to find my love for design, and eventually figuring out that I could make a living designing race cars. Through crudely made websites and a variety of forums, I started to learn the craft of what made a car look good, how to use Photoshop, and gathered a group of friends that helped guide me into becoming better. And in that time period, I never let anyone do the work for me– I insisted on doing it myself and convincing myself that I would never be happy with my final design piece containing anything by someone else that I could have learned and created myself.

Creativity is a very subjective idea– what is creative to some is not to others. Design on the other hand, is something I find to be objective– it’s the plan to make something happen, possibly with a particular outcome in mind. I believe that good design simply doesn’t exist without creativity. As I was learning the ropes of designing cars, the idea of design was never a bother to me– but creativity was. There is only so many things you can do to a car, particularly when a governing body mandates that certain design elements go in certain places, and they have to be of a certain size. Yet in the past 10 years, motor sport design has exploded into something not many people paid much attention to 15 years ago. Cars contain extremely intricate graphics rather than solid-color schemes.

So what makes something creative?

Taking a career in graphic design has always shown me that for every project, there is a set of rules and boundaries that a project must fit. This can range from the size of the paper to the limits a car imposes on us. However, the good designers can look past those boundaries and creatively find a way to make something so amazing that everyone else wonders why they didn’t think of it first. Without creativity, the field of design can’t move forward, and we’d most likely still be stuck with plain white pages of black text in a typeface that was created 600 years ago.

The iMac broke every rule about computer design that was accepted and made people re-think design.

The beauty of creativity sometimes includes the frustrations that go along with it. After all, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. I suppose to some degree (and for another blog post), there are those out there with no creative bone in their body who still like to tell us how we need to do our job, but for a designer, its just one more element in the creative process. As we push our limit of creativity, we find ways around the roadblocks and come out on the other side with something that changes the way people perceive design.

A very nice feature of ITC Chino is the variety of ligatures, alternates, and fractions. While most people using fonts tend not to care about this kind of thing, I think it’s really important to point out. When I work with design interns and their typography (after switching them from Arial to Helvetica), I like to point out that words flow much easier when you can turn to a ligature, or that some letters in a word pair better with either a single story ‘a’ or a double-story ‘a’ for example (more on that in a later post!) A good font like ITC Chino will always offer a good selection, unlike many free fonts out there.

A good combination of curves & straight lines give ITC Chino a structured but soft feel.

I was hit up the free ITC Chino Black Italic offer and really haven’t had the opportunity (or money) to try the rest of the fonts out in this family. But I have had a bit of fun over the past few weeks experimenting and tossing the Black Italic font into some concepts and proposals. This font definitely has a unique character to it that no other font on my system has, which has made it a very welcome addition to my font folder.

If you haven’t already, go ahead and check out the freebie and give it a shot in your next project– you might find how nice it is to work with, opposed to some of the usual fonts you might work with. It’s a great way to mix up the usual and go for something a bit more unique. And as always, I love hearing your comments– what do you think of ITC Chino? And if you’ve had a chance to use it, how did the project or design turn out?

Update

I’m going to close off the contest for the evening! If I picked your name, please DM me on Twitter and give me your email address for your invite! Congratulations to: @mikewrogers, @Gagget and @JKelloggJr!

Font or Swiss cheese?

Lets start with the idea behind this project: we all are guilty of printing lots of stuff out, and as a result we tap our environment as paper and ink are used. Ecofont most likely won’t help with the paper consumption problem, but its goal is to reduce the amount of toner or ink you’re using with its tiny little holes whittled all over it. It comes in two forms– one being the freebie version and the other a business solution, a.k.a. the one that’s going to cost you a few pennies. So while I’m not a fan of this one, I do applaud that someone did take the time to look into a solution that would wean us off toner. However, I just don’t see this as an aesthetically pleasing solution.

When I do take time to notice how people in offices go about printing things off (particularly the internet), I’m not always sure that the font is where we need to start when looking to reduce ink consumption. Consider the last time you wanted to print off a page from a website. Browsers are smart enough to remove the background (which saves a ton just in itself), and if you’re really lucky the web designer took the time to create a print style sheet. But the real problem I see are huge images and advertisements that longer blog posts or more graphic websites still contain. Depending on the length of any given article, even removing a handful of ads will most likely save more ink than Ecofont. If you’re working out of word, consider reducing font sizes from 12pt to a 10pt font– not only are you then dealing with a smaller font, but the reduced size actually helps you look more professional when its printed out. It’s what we do at my day job in our magazine– 10pt font with a 15pt line height and it turns out very well and readable.

If you still feel the need to go out and save the environment though, Ecofont has its own website that you can easily download the freebie or purchase the business edition from.

The big downside I immediately noticed was the lack of any lowercase characters, much of the punctuation, symbols and numbers. For an uppercase set that really shines, this is a huge hit. In some cases, I can forgive the absence of a lowercase set, but other common glyphs would be nice to have with this one– at least the common characters found on a standard US keyboard.

But, if you can look past all the shortcomings, telegrafico is probably going to work fine for a simple project such as a poster where you might not need so much punctuation or any numbers. The simplicity of the font really helps each character jump out and makes the text very readable, even in smaller point sizes.

You can head over to deviantART to download telegrafico. Be aware that this one is good for personal use when you credit the source, but if you do decide to go the commercial route, you’ll be looking at a donation to the author.