This blog is dead!? Well, perhaps that’s a somewhat of a sensationalist overstatement, but let me quickly get to the point, I’ll not write about logo design on this blog anymore. That’s it. The end. Das end. Fin. Finito. Finis. Wow! That’s a biggie, so blog no more?

Well, not really. I’ll not stop writing about logo design, neither terminate the best logo design of the week series, which has been a great success since its started. In a matter of fact, I’ll probably be writing even more in depth articles and tutorials, what is really changing is where I’ll be doing that. Are you picturing where I’m going with this?

Back in September 2012, I decided to start Logoness, which at first, I pictured it as being exclusively a gallery with high quality vector logos for download, but as time passed, I started to see it in a different way, I’ve created a blog area over there, and I’m thinking of expanding it even more, maybe with a portfolio gallery and possibly a forum area.

My vision for Logoness expanded, and I’m aiming to make it the ultimate resource website for logo design on the web. In order to make that happen, I’m planning to dedicate a good deal of time improving my web development skills. All and all, I always feel like learning more coding, and this seems like a great opportunity to accomplish exactly that.

Yes, I know, it’s a bold plan, but hey, I feel really inspired by it. :)

With all of that, it becomes easy to understand the reasoning behind my decision, it doesn’t make much sense to spend so much time writing about logo design on two separate blogs, while also working on to get my coding skills up to scratch.

I had to change something in my daily schedule, and writing less for my personal blog is what I chose to do, but don’t think that was an easy decision to make. Whenever you invest so much time and effort on a blog, the chances are, you develop some emotional attachment to it. It takes a real long time before anyone actually starts to care about what you are writing, but when they do, you get a sense of responsibility to keep on blogging.

I know I do. Making such move should never be taken lightly.

While I don’t plan to stop writing for my personal blog, I expect to see a big drop in visits here, as I’ll be consolidating all logo design related posts over Logoness. So if you’ve been visiting my blog for logo design inspiration, some advice on branding, maybe tutorials and freebies, don’t worry, you’ll still find all of that over there, and more.

I’m still not sure what sorts of topics I’ll be covering here on my personal blog yet, perhaps I’ll end up writing more posts such as this this one, more about the person behind the brand, and less about the brand? Perhaps more blog posts about the challenges of being a freelancer? Or even about the activity of blogging itself? Either way, I know I’ll eventually figure that out, but I’m sure of one thing, I want this space to be as personal as I can. By all means, feel free to suggest topics, but don’t expect to read about what I ate last night just yet.

I would love to hear your opinions about this move, and if you are a blogger, would you do something like that? Or perhaps you’ve done it already? What do you think?

Like reading This Blog is Dead? Subscribe to Ray Vellest.

Even thought the world didn’t end this year, 2012 is about to finish, and it’s the time for another insightful end-of-the-year blog post, where I take the time to review the best of my blog, my accomplishments of the year, and more importantly, it’s when I start to think about the path I’m laying down for the upcoming year.

The best of Ray Vellest in 2012 was certainly the post about a rather funny Starbucks logo that went viral over StumbleUpon just a couple of hours after being published and brought more than 20,000 visits alone. That was really surprising! On the other hand, a post that has been consistently popular throughout the year is the one with logos from the Olympic Games, but considering the London 2012 Olympic games, that turned out to be a pretty obvious result.

Surely this year was not limited just by the two articles I mentioned above. Many other posts were very popular, here’s a list of what people most read on my blog during 2012:

• Modern Vintage Logo Design Inspiration
• Evolution of the Batman Logo by Rodrigo Rojas
• Microsoft Windows 8 New Logo Design
• Free Logo Vectors from Women Magazines
• Doctor Who Logo History
• 10 Fantastic Fonts for Bold Memorable Logos
• 5-year-old Analyses Logos
• The Logo that Should Have Been Stumbled Upon
• How to Organise Your Design Project Folders

It has been a great blogging year, not only because of the sheer amount of visitors I welcomed in my blogs, but also because writing so much is proving to be the best exercise to better my understanding of English grammar. I cannot avoid rolling my eyes whenever I read my old posts, and I’m sure you would too, but the dichotomy between my current and past writing also serves to show that all one needs to become a writer is a lot of practice.

I’m sure I still make a lot of silly mistakes, but I feel much more comfortable with a keyboard than last year. So, following a yearly tradition of classifying my own writing skills, I think this year I’m going with bread-and-butter. Not much, but a big improvement from last year’s outrageously-bad. Woohoo! Way to go me! :)

Actually, this is the first year that I’ve felt confident enough to not use a very demeaning adjective in my classification system. I’m sure I must thank WoordUp for that, a variety blog where I write daily about anything that get my attention during the day. I wrote 647 articles there this year, that’s a lot of practice! If you want to learn how to write, the best advice I can give is to start a daily blog! Practice my friend, as if there was no tomorrow!

With all of that said, the icing on the blogging cake this year was being invited to write for WebDesigner Depot, a blog that I’ve been reading long before I’ve started to think about writing my own. I felt truly honored and it has been a pleasure to reach out to so many of you, whom started to read my blog after finding my posts there. If you haven’t read those yet, I must ask you do, check this page, it contains links to the posts I wrote for them.

I guess that’s it. Oh no, wait, I almost forget to talk about Logoness!

First and foremost, Logoness is a vector logo library I started earlier this year. I’ve been personally checking the quality of hundreds of vectorised logos and uploading them one by one to build the best high quality logo library of the web. If you ever need a vector logo, feel free to use Logoness, and please let me know what you think of it. I would love your feedback.

But that’s not all, I’ve also started a blog area there. I must admit that I’m not sure where that blog is going yet, but the truth is that I would love to find a few collaborators to write about logo design there in the upcoming year. So, just in case, if you are reading this, and would like to get your name out there writing for a new super-duper logo blog, please, by all means, get in touch. If you think your English is not good enough, don’t worry, everyone needs to start somewhere, perhaps I can help you with that.

Well, that’s all folks. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year! :)

Like reading The Best of Ray Vellest 2012? Subscribe to Ray Vellest.

If there’s something which I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed with, already for some time, is the sheer amount of websites in which I’m registered with, especially because, I started to create profiles on every single social media website that popped into existence since social media became the latest thing since sliced bread. Why? Simples, they present an excellent opportunity for personal branding.

But there’s a tiny little problem, how to manage so many usernames and passwords?

Well, I admit, at first, I was simply using the same password for all sites. Yes, I know, that’s a silly thing to do, but since it wasn’t the same password as my email, and it was a 12 digit reasonably secure string, I was happy with it, but that didn’t last long.

The truth is that I can be quite neurotic when it comes to online security, and I do have an excuse for that. I’ve been connected almost since the beginning of the Internet, I first got online back in 1996, and thanks to my programming background, I do know many of the little dirty secrets hackers use to get into someone’s account.

So, as I said before, it didn’t took long for me to start to assign individual passwords to each one of the my accounts, but what the heck, at that point, I had signed up for more than 120 websites, how to manage all of that? Remembering that amount of passwords is humanly impossible, so I did the next best thing. I set up a protected spreadsheet, saved locally, on my computer, with a list of all my websites and passwords.

It worked great! Yes, a little bit of a pain in the ass to keep opening the spreadsheet, copying the password, pasting the password over the browser, well, I’m sure you can already see, was a bit of an extra work, just to keep my accounts safe.

Everything was working great until, guess what? My hard-drive went bananas, yep, all lost, well, not all, because I have a premium account on DropBox, and keep all my files there, but guess what was the only file I kept exclusively in my hard-drive?

Yep, you guessed right, the password spreadsheet!

The good news was that I could recuperate every single password, but the hard way, I would have to sign up to each one of the websites I had an account with, select the recovery password link, and then create a new account for each one of them.

What a waste of time, uh? And guess what? Finding the way to recover the password for some sites out there is almost like trying to find a needle in a haystack! Either way, I got all passwords back, and since then I’ve been experimenting a couple of password management solutions, LastPass and 1Password, but not sure which one I like more yet.

I would love to hear from you, have you had this sort of problem before? What password management would you suggest to manage hundreds of usernames and passwords?

Like reading The Day I Lost My Password List? Subscribe to Ray Vellest.

Free 2012 calendar template. Enjoy! :)

This free 2012 calendar template was created with the goal of helping you to put a calendar with your own brand on your own clients’ desks. Why?

Calendars are promotional items recognised worldwide for its strong marketing and branding value. Give one to your each of your clients and they will you have your brand sitting at their desks during the entire year.

If you haven’t made yours yet, here’s a free template for you! :)

Free 2012 Calendar Template

In order to edit this template you’ll need Adobe Illustrator and the Droid Sans font, the same of I use on my blog, and you can download it here.

I recommend using a cutting mat and cutter for a polished finish.

The template was designed in such a way that you can print and build it yourself. Besides a computer and a printer, all you are going to need are scissors and glue. Use a cutting mat and cutter for a polished finish.

Once you made all the modifications on the template file, print the calendar and make three folding-marks. Position a rule right where the folding mark is going to be made, hold firmly and fold the paper.

The folds must look something like the photo below:

Make all three fold-marks before cutting it.

With the fold marks in place, make the cuts using regular scissors. But if you want a more sharp and polished finish consider using a cutting mat and cutter.

2012 Calendar without bleeding marks.

With that done, all you need to do is to fold the calendar in a triangle shape and glue it together. That can be quite tricky. I suggest adding two stripes of scotch tape on the inside to help keeping the shape firm.

Left side close-up.

Right side close-up. Don’t forget to change the details!

With everything done, this is how your new 2012 calendar must look like:

This is how your template must look like.

Feel free to download my free 2012 calendar template and use it to create your own custom 2012 calendar. Oh, and if you like this calendar template file, please consider subscribing to my blog, I really appreciate that, thanks! :)

By-the-way, I believe you’ll like to check some of my other freebies too:

• Free Twitter Background Template
• Free Adobe Illustrator Templates

Like reading Free 2012 Calendar Template? Subscribe to Ray Vellest.

Even though I’ve been blogging for more than two years, this is the first time that I’m writing a end-of-the-year sort of blog post. I believe the main reason behind this delay is the fact that it was only in 2011 that I started to feel comfortable with my own writing.

So, what’s the best of Ray Vellest in 2011? Most definitely, the most popular articles were the ones with freebies. Earlier this year I’ve put up a Free Twitter Background Template which by the end of the year had thousands of downloads. More recently, a few hundred people downloaded some Free Adobe Illustrator Templates as well. Totally worthy to check them out!

There were many of the more traditional blog posts which were quite popular as well, if you haven’t been following my blog for a long time, perhaps you like some of these too. In order of popularity, here they are:

• Top Tips When Briefing a Designer
• Steve Jobs Talks About the Apple Brand
• Vintage Logos from World of Logotypes
• Modern Vintage Logo Design Inspiration
• Honest Logos by Viktor Hertz
• The Greatest Logos of the Web
• The Most Important Lesson I Learned From Steve Jobs
• Logo Design Galleries for Inspiration
• Humorously Combined Logos

Overall, I’m very happy with my blog in 2011, I’ve learned a lot and even though I consider myself a terrible writer, I’m light-years better than the earlier version of myself. If you are thinking of starting a blog and don’t think your writing skills are sufficient I strongly suggest you to start anyway. You’ll get better with time, just like I did.

I’m very demanding with my own writing skills and I create a classification system to help me keep me humble and push me to improve this much needed skill. This year I classify my own writing as outrageously bad, but I’m very happy because is an outstanding improvement from last year’s classification: shameful rubbish.

This was a great year, most of all a year of discovery and the rebirth of my blog with a focus on the logo design and branding subject. Also, this year I launched WoordUp, my inspirational blog, and moved all the non-design articles there. If you like to get some random cool stuff on your Inbox daily, consider subscribing to its RSS feed. Thanks!

I have much more for 2012, and most likely, a big surprise coming soon, by the end of January 2012. I hope you stay with me, comment, participate and feel free to get in touch! Thanks for reading and happy new year!

Like reading The Best of Ray Vellest 2011? Subscribe to Ray Vellest.

As a graphic designer, you’ll most likely find these adobe illustrator template files quite handy; or at least I hope you do. If so, I would really appreciate if you leave a comment below and follow @layoutlet on Twitter. Thanks!

Adobe Illustrator Template Files

• Business Card Adobe Illustrator Template. Download here.
• CD/DVD Adobe Illustrator Template. Download here.
• Compliment Slip Adobe Illustrator Download here.
• Envelope Adobe Illustrator Template. Download here.
• Folder Adobe Illustrator Template. Download here.
• Letterhead Adobe Illustrator Template. Download here.

Each link leads to a ZIP file containing a variation of sizes. If you don’t find the size you need, let me know and I’ll include in a future update. Alternatively, you can download all Adobe illustrator templates at once here.

Like reading Free Adobe Illustrator Templates? Subscribe to Ray Vellest.

If you have been following my blog, this is the type of post which you know is quite rare. On a matter of fact, I believe the only time I wrote a blog post with a more personal perspective was when I publish a photo of my home office setup.

Honestly, I’m still amazed that I actually wrote that post!

Starting a Blog

If you are a fellow blogger, I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading the next paragraphs. :)

One big challenge faced by any aspiring blogger is to decide the best tone of voice to reach their audiences. When I started, two years ago, I research the subject and got amazing tips from Darren Rowse who maintain a very successful blog about blogging. His most valuable tip was to just be yourself.

In retrospect—and shamefully—I accept that I haven’t been showing much of myself and my personality at all. I would like to believe that’s because I’m the reserved type of guy. Nonetheless, the truth is much more trivial. When I start blogging, I was a terrible terrible writer; now I’m just terrible.

I still have a lot to improve, but I after two years practicing my writing skills, I feel much more confortable to add a bit more of my personality into my blog, and perhaps write more personal articles like this on. Hopefully, this will make the whole blogging experience much more interesting for both of us.

Starting Right Here, Right Now

This post is a very strong way to push myself to be more personal, but more importantly is a straight forward way to let you know that I put a lot of thought into what and how I’m writing. If you have the time, I would love to hear your thoughts about it on the comment area below.

Starting right here, right now. Thanks a lot for reading me! :)

Like reading Being More Personal With My Readers? Subscribe to Ray Vellest.

Last year I wrote about being more personal with my readers, so to keep up with expectations, here’s some insights about where I live and work.

It has been almost 4 years since I moved to Brixton, one of the most multi-cultural boroughs of London, the capital city of the United Kingdom. Before that, I was living in São Paulo, the business capital of Brazil. If you got curious about that, I promisse to get back to my life in Brazil in a future post. :)

Life in Brixton

Brixton is one of the most trendy places of London. Here you’ll find communities from all over the world, and since I also speak Portuguese and Spanish, just by visiting a local market gives me the opportunity to keep my language skills sharp on a daily basis. Fantástico!

The most amazing things I discovered since moving to the area is that Paul Simonon and Mick Jones, both members of The Clash, one of the bands I use to listen during my teenage years, where born and raised in Brixton. The same goes to David Bowie, which I like, but wasn’t one of my favorites.

Here’s some photos of great places to visit in the area:

The Ritzy

This is probably the place I most visit in Brixton, The Ritzy, our local cinema. I love films, so I’m constantly looking for every opportunity to escape to a cinema room. The seats are extremely confortable and the equipment is top-end, all without the high-street price tag.

The Brixton Ritzy. Photo by Jane.

Brixton Library Library

I must admit I haven’t been many times in the Brixton Library, perhaps once or twice, but they seem to be extremely organised and also have a vast library of books. This is the sort of public service I do appreciate, even though I’m not a big user. I guess that Google has been answering all my questions.

Brixton Library. Photo by Steve Cadman.

Brixton Academy

This is certainly the place that everyone in London have been at least once in their life, and to be honest If I was a few years younger I would probably be visiting myself. The Brixton Academy have hosted some of the most amazing artists of the world. Seriously, the list is endless.

On curious fact about the Brixton Academy, at least for myself, it that Sepultura, another band that used to be one of my favourites in my adolescence came all the way from Brazil to record the album Under a Pale Grey Sky in this famous theatre.

Brixton Academy. Photo by Odile Monod.

Brixton Village

I’m not always shopping there, simply because I love the convenience of home delivery, but that’s the place to go to find things you wouldn’t find anywhere else. I recommend the Brazilian butcher inside the gallery who sells Picanha, a traditional Brazilian meat cut which in English is also know as top sirloin.

Brixton Village. Photo by Steve Cadman.

Brixton Village. Photo by Jenny Reilly.

Brixton Village Inside View. Photo by Susan Tomlinson.

Brixton Mill

The Brixton Mill is certainly the place I most like in Brixton. I’m a sucker for things that have something to tell, and every-time I visit the Mill, I can’t stop wondering how would the surrounding area would look 500 years ago.

Brixton Mill. Photo by Victoria Peckham.

Brixton Mill Inside View. Photo by Owen Llewellyn.

Excerpt from Brixton Windmill website:

…Brixton Windmill was built in 1816 on part of Stockwell Manor. It was built by John Muggeridge and Sons – family builders involved in the development of Brixton in the first half of the 19th century. [more]

If you’re in London, I recommend visiting the Brixton Mill. It’s a magical place.

Design Studio

Finally, here’s where I work, my own design studio. So, if you hire me from a distant corner of the world, here’s where I will spend time working on your very sucessful new logo or brand. Perhaps, brainstorming at the Mill. :)

If you like this, perhaps you’ll like to learn more about my office setup.

Like reading Where does Ray Vellest live and work?? Subscribe to Ray Vellest.

The idea for this article came to me while I was designing Profileness, a blog about using social media profiles to get your branding going on the web. To celebrate the incoming blog, I’ve put together a fully editable Photoshop Twitter background template. The best of all, you can download it for free!

Keep in mind that your custom background may not show entirely depending on the resolution of the viewer. Play it safe by keeping all relevant text information within the first 200 pixels from the left side.

Feel free to download the Photoshop Twitter Background Template and use it to create your own custom Twitter background. Oh, and If you’re interested on branding with social media, follow @profileness on Twitter to keep updated.

Like reading Free Twitter Background Template? Subscribe to Ray Vellest.