Archive for category Graphic design
Some great design blog and e-zine articles
Posted by Design Drops in Fonts, Graphic design, Logo design, Website design on March 17th, 2011
It seems Design Drops wasn’t the only blog thinking about fonts and typography in the past week. A quick read around the blogiverse come up with some fantastic font and typography-related posts at some of the most popular design-related blogs and e-zines.
Hongkiat looked into Fonts Used in Logos of Popular Brands, and admitted that with thousands of free fonts available these days, it can be hard to decide on the perfect typeface. (The instantly recognisable Facebook logo above, uses Klavika OT, released in 2004).
Remember to “like” us on Facebook, post your best cure for creative block and go in the draw to win an iPod.
Over at Smashing magazine, there’s an informative post about technical web typography techniques. It reminds the reader that 95 per cent of the web is typography and goes into some detail about the rules to apply when deciding on such things as font type and size.
Meanwhile, noupe has a fantastic tutorial on creating test effects and eye-catching typography using Adobe Illustrator.
While we’re on the subject of Illustrator, which might be considered too expensive or complicated for sole-operators, onesxtrapixel, provides readers with some alternative drawing programs, such as Corel Draw and GIMP.
To finish on a more serious note, French brand Kulte has posted on Design You Trust that it has designed and is selling a t-shirt with all profits going to the Japanese earthquake appeal.
Design links to amuse and inspire
Posted by Design Drops in Graphic design on February 25th, 2011
Here at Design Drops, we realise that this is not the only thing online that designers enjoy, so we thought we’d share some links that we have been reading lately.
It’s hard to go past www.clientsfromhell.net, a hilarious contributor-driven blog about the kinds of requests/discussion/suggestions that designers have to put up with every day. Some real gems here, including:
As far as the logo goes, I’m just looking for the name in a circle with some fire shit around it.
There’s always something new and it’s worth bookmarking.
On a similar theme, US based web design company Agency Fusion, shows it has a sense of humour with its Make My Logo Bigger Cream advertisement, which has generated more than 800,000 unique hits and resulted in 700-plus calls about its services. It’s what the rest of us dream about.
Travis Boyles, a disgruntled copywriter who also has a dream and an amusing turn of phrase, has posted on craigslist that I’d do Anything. I hope he got a gig.
Or how about Ikea-inspired instruction for building Stonehenge?
And if you’re bored, you can always test your knowledge with the brand alphabet quiz. It’s not an easy as you might think.
We’d love to hear if any readers have some fun links to share. Post a comment with the link and we’ll feature them in a future post.
Top 10 logo designs 2010
Posted by Design Drops in Graphic design on February 19th, 2011
So, we’re a little late with this one, it being nearly the end of February 2011, but we’ve been taking our time mulling over some fantastic logos created worldwide during 2010.
It was a tough decision, but being entirely subjective and based on nothing but our opinion, we’d like to offer you Design Drops top 10 new logos of last year, in no particular order. Some show great use of negative space, others are witty, but all are eye-catching and creative.
The Optimistic Beverages (Helms Workshop) logo at the top of the page topped pretty much every list at the time, so we are just one of its many fans. But it is a truly great design for a start-up craft brewing company in Austin, Texas. We wish them luck.
Bob’s House for Dogs (Stacie Paul) is a not-for-profit that houses stray and unwanted dogs.
The above logo for a UK-based website design company was created by 25-year old Serbian designer Shewa.
Is it a map of Africa? Or a face in profile? Great piece of creative from Dan Designs.
Wonderfully evocative image from Yeria Elsafan, who unfortunately doesn’t seem to have a website to link to.
2011, the Year of the Rabbit. Not quite twee, not quite cute, but very interesting logo from Bercea Oleg, another designer that doesn’t appear to have a website.
OK Textil is a Spanish-based wholesale distributor of promotional apparel. Sublima Comunicacion designed this simple, but effective, logo.
Clever use of design elements from Joanna Malik.
We love this innovative design for a restaurant, thanks to India’s visuAlchemy.
Human creates original music and sound design for advertising, TV , film and interative media. This design, by Paul Driver of Social UK, includes a typographic tweak that makes it stand out.
We would love to hear from you as to your favourite logos of last year.
Or perhaps you have some that are truly awful, that we can showcase in a future post.