Don’t Add, Only Subtract
Every element in a logo design is a potential distraction and every extra detail is one more thing to forget. The most successful logos of the biggest companies are usually one or two words with maybe one simple symbol. Be absolutely ruthless while subtracting from your logo. Leave only the most important elements.

No Photographs
Photographs, pieces of photographs, and bitmapped images like photographs do not belong in a logo. They don’t scale and are difficult to recognize, especially when your logo is resized. Replace photographic elements with a symbol equivalent (or remove them completely).

Multiple Versions
Once your logo concept is solid, sometimes you’ll need different logo versions for specific uses. For instance, you may need a logo for printing on dark backgrounds, a version that is very small, or a very simple version for photocopy and fax. A strong logo must be flexible.

Legibility
Small print text blurs when the logo is small, decorative fonts are difficult to read, and low contrast colors hide your text. Text should typically be large, use conservative fonts, and have high contrast with its background. Unreadable text is ugly and wasteful.

Scaling and Spacing
People like certain ratios common in nature so use them in your logo to improve its wow gold composition. The most famous natural ratio is the “golden ratio” Phi. (about 1.618) Also, use the typographic scale for to keep your font sizes “in tune.” In good design, these natural ratios appear often. But don’t rely on intuition; break out those rulers and calculators and verify those ratios. Yes… calculators. See? Math is good for everything. (fact)

Vectors
Vector graphics are shapes, lines, and colors that can be mathematically defined. A vector master-copy of your logo is important, especially for printing and for maintaining the integrity of your logo. A logo only saved as a bitmap (or worse, only as physical copy) like a jpg or tiff can’t be enlarged, loses data when shrunk, and usually prints poorly. What looks good on a computer screen rarely looks good in print.

Once I had 6-8 rough ideas conceived I then scanned in the designs and used them as templates for the creation of computer generated concepts. I typically place them in the background and insert text and graphics over the top. Once the groundwork has been laid in I then remove the sketch from the background and add the finishing touches.

The initial presentation to the client contained anywhere 4 concepts that I felt worked best with the impression they were looking to achieve. These first ideas were presented in black & white. I have found that clients will initially lose interest in a concept if the colors are not to their liking. On more than one occasion I have seen ideas rejected solely on the basis of the colors used without the client giving any regard to the overall design presented.

Once a concept was chosen by the client the design was revised, if logo design necessary, and then rendered in color and resubmitted to the client for approval. There are usually 6-8 color renderings for the client to choose from, in this case there were 8. Most of these featured colors from the same palette (warm, cool, etc.) and there will be perhaps one or two ideas that could be considered “outside the box”. It is these additional color options that will either direct the client towards the preferred palette or will illicit a sense of excitement from the client about color choices they never imagined would be appealing. This can be one of the steps where a real sense of creativity can be injected into the design process.

The client immediately accepted one of the designs and now the only step left was to finalize the project. I provide most of my clients with a CD that contains their logo design in a number of different formats. Some designers may feel this enables the client to take the design and use other sources for the rest of their design work, but I have found that this merely gives the client a sense that they have recieved something concrete and if I have done my job correctly and have fulfilled all their desires then they will certainly use my services again.

As it turned out in this case I was hired by Core Practice Partners to design their stationery as well as numerous marketing materials. The logo of a company is an integral part of their brand identity. By establishing a good relationship with a client in this critical step towards creating the brand that will become their public presence you can build a solid foundation to creating a long term position as their designer of choice.

So what makes a “good” logo? Most people would answer “I just know it when I see it!” and this isn’t so far from the truth. A good logo catches the eye - it makes the observer curious or engaged, if only for a short moment. A moment in which an image and the existence of your company is embedded in the mind rather than filtered out with a million other daily stimuli. But even if a good logo ‘just is’, there are elements for making it happen and we will look at some of those.

There are three basic types of logos, which can be used alone or combined within one design:

illustrative logos (a logo which clearly illustrates what your company does),
graphic logos (a logo that includes a graphic, often an abstraction, of what your company does), and
font-based logos (a text treatment which represents your company)
Creating a logo is always a process - though different designers have their own methods. Many designers will begin by sketching thumbnails or playing with shapes on the computer screen, until something “clicks” and they follow that path to see where it leads. One way to start is to select a shape which represents the concept of the company, and begin playing with it. The idea is to come up with something interesting or clever, whether a viewpoint which is different, or an unusual combination of shapes. Perhaps it will be something which will require some guesswork on the part of the viewer, but then be crystal clear when they look at it another way.

Many designers prefer to developing logos beginning with, or consisting entirely of text. By experimenting with fonts, size, shapes they seek to find an interesting way to represent the company using the form of letters. Again, simplicity is extremely important - this is not the time to use fancy decorative fonts. Whether alone or combined with graphic elements, the text in a logo must be easily readable at small sizes.

Once a form for the logo has been defined, color needs to be considered. Again, color for a logo should remain simple. You can wow gold always get fancy with the web version, but a good logo must work well in one color and gradients of that color. The color should enhance and support the form of the logo - for example, various shades of blue on the sides of a 3D box should be the same as they would in real life.

Contrast is another powerful concept in the creation of logos - you can contrast size, color, fonts, textures - to create visual interest.

A logo should be simple and abstract, not be complicated or confusing, and again, all elements must be discernible when reproduced in small sizes.

I have been thinking of getting my own business logo. But I don’t have any design ideas yet. It’s a good thing online resources abound when it comes to thoughts on business logo designs. Here’s one from logo making tip from SB Informer Guides.

Logo Longevity - Think Ahead!

The durability and longevity of a logo is worth considering. Although it’s impossible to see into the future, it is useful to picture your company 10-15 years down the road, and think about what kind of products and services it will offer, if any at all! Even the strongest companies update their logo every 15 years or so, but often website design the changes will be subtle in nature. Very seldom will they take on a radical re-design.

For small start-up companies, it may not be the end of the earth if you decide to change your logo after even a few years, depending on what transpires with your company.

But it’s always nice when a logo design is able to stand the test of time.

Tip 1 - Use a reference (but don’t copy it!)
If you see an interesting web design, color scheme or layout, try to use it as a starting point for your own web design.

Tip 2 - Be unique
Try to create a unique design. Do not overdone your web design by adding numerous animated GIFs, fade-ins, etc.

Tip 3 - Content is king
Create content that purely relates to your website, the more pages with useful content you have the better. Make the body text on your wow gold index page focused and avoid the need for the user to scroll down on any page.

Tip 4 - Graphical elements
Any Graphics that you use on the website should always support the content and never dominate the content.

Tip 5 - Be HTML-compliant
Follow the proper HTML standards and check whether your website is HTML-compliant, to make sure that your website is displayed correctly in all browses.

Tip 6 - File size
Make sure that your site is quick to load in any browser. There are obviously a number of factors that can affect how quickly a website loads, but try to make sure that large file sizes isn’t one of them.

Tip 7 - Colorsheme
Use a colorscheme of logo design matching colors. Avoid excessive use of shouting colors such as green, yellow, or red.

Include your logo design in all pages. Position it at the top left or each page. Complement your logo with a tagline or catchy sentence that summarizes your business purpose. For example “Always low prices” is the tagline for Wal-Mart.

Create a favicon. A favicon is that small graphic that appears next to the URL in the address bar.

Have a consistent look and feel in all your pages. Use a color scheme and layout that are clearly recognized across your site.

Have an About Us section, that includes all relevant information about you and your business.
Include a copyright statement at the bottom of each page.

Tips on website design navigation

Design your pages to load in less than 10 seconds (50Kb maximum size, including pictures).
Group your navigational options in relevant categories.

Use common names for your menu options: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Help, Products. Avoid “clever” or “trendy” alternatives.

If your site uses Flash, provide also an HTML version for users who prefer a less fancy, faster site.

Provide simple text navigation links at the bottom of long pages, so users don’t need to scroll back up.

Link your logo to your homepage, except in the homepage itself. Put a link to your homepage on all your internal pages.

Display a “breadcrumb trail”; it is basically the path from the homepage to the page where you are. A breadcrumb trail looks like this: Home > Section > Sub-Section > Page, and it greatly facilitates navigation.

If your site is too big, provide Search capabilities. Include a search box in the upper right corner of your homepage, and a link to a Search page from your interior pages. Freefind ( ) offers you a free and powerful search engine for your site.

Set your search box to search your site, not to search the web.

Create a custom error page that displays a simple site map with links to the main sections of your site. That way, you will not lose visitors that have followed a bad link to your site or who have misspelled your URL.

Tips on Layout and Content Presentation

Save the top of your page for your most important content. Remember: good content must flow to the top.

Lay out your page with tables, and set the width in percentage terms instead of a fixed number of pixels. That way, your page will always fit the screen, without the need to scroll horizontally.

Optimize your page to be viewed best at 800×600 (the most popular resolution at the time of this writing).

Use high contrast for the body of your page: black text on white background, or white text on black background work best.

Don’t use too many different fonts in one page. Also, avoid using small serif fonts (like Times Roman): they are difficult to read from a computer screen. Verdana is the most web-friendly font, since it is wide, clean and easy to read.

Avoid long blocks of text. Use tools that facilitate scanability, like bullets, subtitles, highlighted keywords, hyperlinks, etc.

Avoid amateurish features like: numeric page counters, wholesale use of exclamation points, all caps, center justified blocks of text, excessive animated gifs, busy backgrounds, etc.

Don’t use pop-up windows. They distract your visitors and are immediately dismissed as ads.
Test your site so that it looks good in different browsers and resolutions.

Tips on Writing for the Web

Write in layman’s terms so that everybody can understand your content, unless you’re running a technical site for technical people.

Reading from a screen is painful: use 50% less words than you would use on print.
If a page is too long, break it into several pages and link to them.

Don’t use font sizes smaller than 10pt. for the body of your page. Specify your fonts in percentage terms instead of pixels, to let users set their own size preferences using their browser’s text view options.

Use a spell checker. Spelling mistakes are embarrassing and hurt credibility.

Tips to Know Your Customers

Ask for feedback: include a feedback form in your Contact Us page.
Publish an ezine and include a subscription form in your homepage. Give your customers valuable information and encourage them to contact you.
Include polls and other tools to gather market intelligence.

Tips on Linking

Make your links descriptive. They should indicate what the user will be linking to, as opposed to just saying “click here”.

Don’t underline anything that is not a link.

Underline your links and use a consistent color for them across your site (preferably blue).

Use a different color for visited links, so that your visitors know where they’ve been (preferably purple or a more subdued tone of the unvisited links color).

When linking to a non-HTML file, such as Excel, Word or Acrobat, make it evident, by including a small icon next to the link.

Don’t link to “under construction” pages.

Make sure that your links work and that you don’t have broken links. There are free online tools that can help you with this.

If you use graphic links, don’t forget to use the ALT attribute. The ALT attribute should describe what are you linking to.

Tips on how to use graphics

Optimize your graphics. Use only .gif and .jpg formats. Make your image files as small as possible while maintaining acceptable quality. Use a free online graphics optimization tool.
Use thumbnails (miniature versions of a picture) and make them clickable to the actual size picture.

Avoid graphics that look like ads. People ignore them.

Use the ALT attribute on pictures, even the image is not a link. It helps users with disabilities and people who have turned off graphics.

Tips to optimize your site for the search engines:

Create short, descriptive page titles, to entice search engine users to click on your links.

Create a site map containing all your pages, and link to it directly from your homepage. Search engine robots will follow the link to your site map and will most likely add all your pages to the index.

Decide what the two or three main keywords are for each page (the words you believe search engine users will type to find your page) and repeat them often in your page title, description meta tag and page body.

Create a Links page and call it Resources. In it, place links to those sites that have agreed to place a reciprocal link to your page. The more inbound links you have from quality sites with a topic related to your site, the better your site will rank with the search engines.
Use more text than graphics, and minimize the use of Flash and JavaScript. Search engines heavily favor text and will crawl and index your site faster.

Now, on to those 5 tips:
1. Learn what a logo is and what it represents
Before you design one, you must understand what a logo is, what it represents and what it is supposed to do. A logo is not just a mark – it reflects a business’s commercial brand through the use of shape, fonts, colour, and / or images.

A logo is for inspiring trust, recognition and admiration for a company or product and it is our job as designers to create an identity that will do its job.

One must first know what a logo is before website design continuing.

For further Reading on what a logo is, check out Wikipedia’s definition or CreativeBits’s discussion on what is a logo?

2. Know the rules and principles of logo design
Now that you know what a logo is supposed to do, and what it should represent, you now must learn what makes a great logo aka; the basic rules and principles of logo design.

As David quotes:

1. A logo must be describable
2. A logo must be memorable
3. A logo must be effective without colour
4. A logo must be scalable i.e. effective when just an inch in size

For Further reading on the rules and principles of great logo design I highly recommend reading these logo design tips from Logo Factory before continuing.

3. Learn off other’s successes and mistakes

Successful Logos

Now you know what the rules of logo design are, you can distinguish the difference between a good and a bad log. By knowing which logos have succeeded, and why, gives a great insight into what makes a good logo.

For example, let’s look at the classic Nike Swoosh (shown above). This logo was created by Caroline Davidson in 1971 for only $35, yet it’s still a strong, memorable logo, effective without colour and easily scalable. It is simple, fluid and fast, and represents the wing in the famous statue of the Greek Goddess of victory, Nike (something perfect for a sporting apparel business). The Nike logo is just one of many great designs, think about other famous brands that you know about and check out their logos. What makes them successful?

For more quality, lesser known logos I recommend browsing LogoPond or visiting your local book store or library and reading some books on logo design.

The Not So Successful Logos

We can also learn from logos that have not been too successful, such as the ones on the right of the above picture. Some more very bad logos can be seen in the post is your logo design phallic? As seen in wow gold that post, some logos can depict things that may not always be noticeable to the designer (as in the middle logo above) or they could just be plain bad design, as in the logo to the right (above).

4. Establish your own logo design process
Now that we know what a logo is, what the principles and rules of logo design are and what makes a successful logo, we’re now prepared to begin the design process. This is the hardest part of these 5 tips, and is a whole topic in itself. Each person’s process is different and experience is usually the key factor when creating your own logo design process. For an example of a well established method, take a look at David Airey’s logo design process.

In short, a logo design process usually consists of:

1. The Design Brief
2. Research and Brainstorming
3. Sketching
4. Prototyping and Conceptualising (See Step 5)
5. Send to Client for Review
6. Revise and Add Finishing Touches
7. Supply Files to Client and Provide Customer Service

If you ever get stuck before or during your design process, I’ve provided some tips on How To Boost Your Creativity.

5. Learn the software and complete the logo

After you have got your design process sorted out, it is usually a good time to begin mastering your software (here’s a selection of Adobe Illustrator tutorials for reference). But before I get to that, I want to point out that Step 4 and Step 5 overlap, as it’s a catch 22 situation – you can’t design a logo by just hopping straight onto the computer, nor can you complete a logo design without knowing your software (the Abode Creative Suite is a popular choice with professional designers).

Putting this aside, once you have arrived at your initial ideas and sketches from brainstorming, you can then move onto the computer to start digitizing your logo. After you have digitized the great concept(s), your client is ready to review your work, ask for possible revisions, and complete the design project. Thus, you have successfully created a professional logo.

Designing web sites to fit all resolutions is a very important Website design principle. Try out the Entheos site in all resolutions higher than 800 x 600 and you will find that it is designed to fit the page exactly. Therefore, visitors who have higher resolution can see more content in one page which reduces scrolling. Most web sites are designed for only one resolution. They may look perfect in a 800 x 600 resolution but if viewed in a 1024 x 768 resolution look a little empty. You’ll find a lot of wasted space around it making the web site look quite small.

From our research we have found that majority of our viewers are on the 1024×768 resolutions and higher. As time goes by more and more people are going to switch to higher resolutions as seen by our site statistics. It is therefore very important to design web sites for all resolutions. That is one of the principles we follow while designing web sites for our clients. With that bit of background information, lets get started on how to design a web site for all screen resolutions.

Step 1: Decide on the lowest Screen Resolution
Before you start you need to decide on your lowest screen resolution. Your web site will have to be designed keeping the lowest resolution in mind. Through our research we have found that less than 0.5% are on the 640 x 480 resolution So we ignore that completely. The next important resolution is the 800 x 600 resolution. Some of our visitors are on this resolution so we use this as our lowest screen resolution. This means that our web site has to fit all resolutions equal to or higher than 800 x 600.

Step 2: Design Your Web Site On This Resolution
Once you decide on your lowest screen resolution you need to design your web site for that resolution This means that all your graphics will be designed for this resolution. Design your web site and export the images as you would normally do.

Step 3: While converting your design to HTML make sure all your tables are measured in terms of percentages
Important: This is the trick to developing Website design for all resolutions. You need to work in terms of percentages and not pixels. If you work in pixels you are giving an absolute measurement to a table, whereas working in percentages gives a relative measurement. The table will be a given percentage of the screen resolution.

I hope you have understood this clearly. I’d like to explain this with an example. If you were to design a site for a 800 x 600 resolution, you would probably make a table with width 800 px and height 600 px. Now if you were to design a web site for all resolutions you need to make a table with width and height 100%, so that whatever the screen resolution may be the web page will scale to fit the page. It will be 100% of the screen resolution or whatever percentage you choose to give it.

The first step is logo design to make a table with 100% height and 100% width. You could make it 95% if you want some white space around it.

Step 4: Within the table measure cells in terms of pixels except for the cell for the content
This a another very important step. You need to give a fixed measurement to all your cells except for the content cell. You can leave this cell blank.

Effective Navigation Guidelines
While designing the navigation for your site keep the following points in mind:

Organized Links
Make sure your links are well organized logo design according to the order of importance. Visitors should be easily able to find what they are looking for under different categories.
E.g. All our main links are found on the top i.e. our services, products,portfolio, resources etc.Other interesting links are found on the right of the page. These are common and consistent throughout the site.
Finally if the web page belongs to a guide E.g web design guide you will find the related links below the right menu and also at the bottom of the page.

Note: Related links are very important as visitors coming to a particular page will probably be interested in more information you have under the same topic.

Clear and Prominent
Once you have decided on your navigation wow gold links, you need to think of the best place to put them. Navigation should be clear and consistent. Try to design your navigation on the top or on the left as these are the first places our eyes go to. Also locate the primary links high enough on the page so that they are visible without scrolling. Navigation images should be seamlessly integrated into the site design. Avoid putting navigation links at the bottom of the page as visitors will need to scroll right down to see the links. If you like you could put the important links at the top AND bottom of the page just to make sure your visitors don’t miss the link.

Consistent
Navigation should be clear and consistent. The important links of your website should be on every page, in the same location, and in the same sequence. Don’t confuse your visitors by putting your navigation links in different places in different pages.

Easy to understand
Make your links easy to understand and to the point. Usually you won’t have enough place to have long links so make use of the space wisely. Visitors need to know where they will go on clicking on a particular link, so make sure your links are understandable or nobody is going to click on your links, which will defeat the purpose of designing a good navigation system.

DHTML Menus
If you have a large number of links under categories and sub-categories you could use navigation menus to organize your links. There are many cut ‘n’ paste scripts available on the Net that you could use to create great navigation systems. A favorite resource center is SimplyTheBest.net, you’ll find tons of useful navigation menus that are very easy to install on your site.

Minimize the use of images - The key to a fast loading web site is to minimize the use of images. Images do enhance a page but don’t make 80% of your web site only images. Instead break it down as much as possible to simple HTML. Notice the popular sites like Yahoo, Google, Ebay, Amazon etc., they have very few images because the load time is more important. Very often simple designs are the best.

Optimize images for the web - Once you have decided on the images that you need on your site, make sure that it is optimized for the web. They should be in the gif or jpeg format. You can also minimize the size of the image by choosing the number of colors you need, from the color palette. The less the colors you choose, the less the size of the image. You can also use online tools like Gif Wizard to optimize your images or to get a recommendation on how to cut down the size of an image.

Use Tables creatively - You can get some great website design looking designs by using tables creatively . Tables load very fast because it is just HTML code. Tables can be used in the homepage, menus or anywhere you like. Check out our homepage and our menus to see how we have used tables in our site.
Read more on Using HTML Tables Creatively

Cut down the use of animated gifs - Don’t use animated gifs unless it is necessary. Animated gifs take a long time to load and can also be very irritating. But since they catch your attention you could use small animated gifs to draw a visitor’s attention to a particular section of your site.

Design simple icons - Instead of using big, bulky images use simple and small icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor. We have used small icons in our homepage to highlight the main sections of our site.

Use background images instead of big images whenever web design possible - Use background images whenever possible. This is usually a very useful tip for headers and footers. Instead of using an image of width 580 which is a uniform design you can use just a part of that as a background fill. This reduces the size of the web page as the image is small. The code will look like this :

Try out CSS Styles - Have fun with CSS styles to get some cool text effects. Again, a CSS Style is simple HTML code so it loads very fast. You can create cool rollovers using CSS Styles.
Rollover the text on the right menu to see how we have used CSS Styles to get a simple but nice text effect.
Check out our CSS Styles tutorial for more cool tips on CSS Styles

Use Flash sparingly - There seems to be a lot of hype about Flash but I recommend that you minimize the use of Flash on a site. Don’t make entire sites using Flash. It may look great but it takes hours to load and can really put off visitors. If you do want to use Flash use it within an HTML site and make sure it loads fast.

Design most of your site in HTML - As much as possible try to design your site using HTML. You can create great designs by just using HTML code. Use tables, CSS Styles and simple fonts to design your site. Minimize the use of animated gifs, Flash, bulky images etc.

Keep checking your load time - Last but not least, before you decide on the final design of your web site, check its load time on NetMechanic. This site gives you a free analysis of your web site which is extremely useful. We kept using it to improve our site till we got a report that said good loading time!