How to design a good logo?

There are many ways to design a good logo, but we are sharing some important points which will be helpful in designing logos.
First let understand what is logo?

In simple terms logo identifies a business in its simplest form via the use of a mark and icon. 
“Justcreative.com”

1. Start with design brief & research?

After getting the brief by preparing questionnaire or interview with client always start with research.
- Get the full information about the companies’ history.
- Understand the companies name and type of product they are producing.
- What is their mission and vision?
- Who are the competitors of the company?
- What is their current market position?
- What is the current trend in the market related to design?
- Always ask the constraints to the client related to color because some clients have their establish color in the market.
- Know each and every detail which is required to design a good logo.

The benefit of the research is that you will get clear picture what is the expectation of client also it will help in designing the appropriate logo design according to market and competitor.

2. Sketch

Well it will be great if anyone is following a design process but can move ahead to the Sketch part because it is one of the important part in it. Start conceptualizing the ideas on paper before moving to the computer because once you will put all the thoughts on the paper then it will be easy to choose the few and finalize concepts for the digital designing process.
    

3. Choose the right Color

Always try to get the right color for the logo because different color has different meanings, communicate ideas and it affects organization/product image in the market. Also keep in mind that your logo should also function in gray-scale in worst situation.
     

4. Keep logo simple

While designing logo try to keep it simple because human mind scan & remember simple things easier and longer. As you can see flat design is a best example for it they have reduced the clutterness and removed the unwanted elements in the design. Same logic works in the logo design also. A simple logo is always memorable.
  

5. Logo should be versatile

Logo should be versatile because it is used in different places and in different collateral so it should work across variety of medium and application.

6. Logo should be unique

Logo should be unique in that way that it should stand out in the crowd and the market. For example apple logo without byte has no meaning it is that byte which makes it unique.

7. Logo should be scalable

Logo should be scalable for that always start making designing in vector format because it is always scalable. Logo must be scalable and effective in inch sizes. 

8. Better to have your handmade font for logo

It will be great if you made custom typeface/font for logo because if you are going with available fonts in the market then it will not be unique more once it is discovered by other people. So always try to make custom handmade fonts.
   

9. Learn from other’s logo success

Always look in to other works and learn from their successful logo story. Thousands of great successful logo case studies are available online read it to understand their process and their thinking what techniques they used to make a good logo.

10. Learn the software

Well if you are a graphic designer then it is expected that knows that software which is required for logo designing if not then start learning software from today itself. It hardly takes a month to mastering it. Illustrator and Coraldraw are the main software which is used by most of the designer and lots of tutorials are available online. But always keep in mind with brainstorming or idea jumping on the software is not going to help you.

Author: Shivin Mittal ( @MittalShivin)

How to Organize a Style Guide

How do you organize a style guide? The information architecture of a style guide impacts why people use it, how often they seek it out, and when they think to reference it. The IA also makes some assumptions (or preferably, builds on knowledge) around who the audience is, and what knowledge they have.

In a recent client project we faced this very question, and considered three possible solutions to organize the style guide.

Style Guide by Audience

Some style guides are intended for use across organizations with multiple different audiences: editors, writers, videographers, designers, etc. Or, the organization may have several brands, with guidelines that differ for each.

For these companies, the best way to organize a style guide might be by audience. An audience-driven style guide has the Brand or Titles at the top level, and assumes that the audience will self-identify to dig deeper.

Ben & Jerry’s has content creators working on illustrations, and others using photography. For their style guide the audience is the first consideration.

Style Guide By Guideline

Another way to organize a style guide is by the type of guidelines. Perhaps there are certain guidelines that everyone in the company looks for - such as “Capitalizations”, “Voice and Tone”, or “Grammar issues”. This is particularly likely if the organization has outside writers working for them, who may not become easily familiarized with the basic guidelines.

In these cases, even if there are multiple brands, that designation becomes secondary to the guideline people are likely to search for. Allowing people to easily skim through “Grammar Issues” is helpful when coming up against the serial comma!

Cigna’s Digital Experience Standards are a great example of a style guide organized by guideline.

Style Guide By Content Type

A third way to organize a style guide is by content type. Perhaps your team works in numerous mediums, from video to blogs to press releases to social media. The style, the voice, even the grammatical rules may change from one to the next! Whether the same content creators must bounce between content types, or whether the creators are self-selecting their area of interest, content type is a useful hierarchy when multiple mediums are involved.

Mailchimp’s Voice and Tone style guide showcases how to organize guidelines by content type.

How Do You Organize a Style Guide?

To choose the best way to organize a style guide you first must consider:

• How many people are using this? 
• How do they categorize themselves (e.g. writers vs editors, or videographers vs bloggers)?
• What common questions do they ask, that this style guide will answer?

With these three questions you’ll be well on your way to determining the architecture and hierarchy of your style guide. 

Hollow Icon vs. Solid Icon Which Is More Friendly for Recognizing

In UI design, what scenario should hollow icons and solid icons be applied to? Some believe that the hollow icons are visually more complex than the solid icons, while the solid icons are in fact more recognizable.

The opinions of designers on this topic varies. Some designers think that the hollow icons is made by lines, as a result of which, they are more difficult to recognize. However, they gives users a feeling of ease and exquisiteness. Others deem that the recognizability has nothing to do with this topic, but depends on the shape, color and other factors of the icon.

1. The function of icons.

First, this topic focuses on a specific type of icons: functional icon. Let’s take a look at the basic functions of this type of icons.

Functional icons are common in life, usually seen in the airport, stations, hotels, shopping malls and other large public places, providing guidance to people, as shown below:

In UI design, icons are one of the most common elements. The use of the icon originated in the Macintosh 1.0, even in the earlier Xerox graphical interface began. They are often given functions like action, description and so on.

Since the release of the smart phone system so far, the style of graphical interface has completed the transformation from the material design to the flat design evolution. With the introduction of ios7, almost all of the icons in Apps are becoming more and more flat and slim. The reason of it is that the over-eye-catching icons usually reduce the readability of the contents.

In general, the most basic function of the icons is to convey the information quickly.

In today's design work, the matching of icons and texts has reached a point of obsession. In fact, it is enough to express some abstract concepts with text. Putting an icon aside actually helps nothing about making users build connections between the icon and its function.

Nevertheless, icons are still relatively important. The function of icons is far more than “telling users the meaning on the first sight”. In addition, there are also many important features like immediate locating, content layer distinguishing and interface rhythm increasing.

Take a prototype example on Mockplus for example, if you just see the icons without the texts, the meaning of them is quite obscure. However, the functions of icons are more than that. The icons in the prototype is solid. The icons and the text together form a unity, in which the icons plays a role of alignment. If you remove the icons, the information in the list will be indistinguishable and there will be a visual confusion. Users will face more difficulty when focusing on the options on a line.

2. Are solid icons more recognizable?

Given that you were summoned by the call of nature and rushed into the big mall to find the rest room. Solid icons or hollow icons? Which can be recognized more quickly?

Solid icons are indeed more recognizable in the perspective of visual attraction. The following picture shows the influence of the elements that are attractive to the human eye (sorted from left to right):

Hollow icons attract the eye by their shapes while the solid ones do the same by their color. As a result, hollow icons are more difficult to recognize.

As early as the iOS7 system was introduced, there have been some discussion about this topic. Curt Arledge, an experienced designer who graduated from Viget, wrote an APP specifically, and did 1260 recognition tests for solid and hollow icons [1], look at the test results:

The results found that the difference of the speed of recognizing these two types of icons is just 0.1 seconds.

In the first group, the solid icons won. These icons are derived from life, the icons kept their original meanings. The recognition speed depends on how much the color and shape attract the eyes. So the solid icons are easier to recognize.

It is worth noting that the three hollow icons are more recognizable in the second group.

These three icons are abstracted from subjects in real life, among which the speech bubble does not exists at all. Designers create this icon in the graphical interface and endow it with a meaning; The forms of garbage bin and keys are various in life, so the icons of them are abstract summaries of them. In this case, the shape of the icons allows users to quickly identify the meaning of the icons, while the colors has become a factor of interference.

So, for icons expressing the same meaning of the original subjects, solid icons are more recognizable. For icons that endowed with abstract meanings, hollow icons are better.

7 amazing Photoshop plugins for web designers

Web and visual designers use Adobe Photoshop extensively to create visual designs, images, assets etc. There are some Plugins available which not only make their life easy but also improve their efficiency by giving more flexible solutions. 7 must have plugins are listed below for web designers.

1. CSS3PS

Free cloud based Photoshop plugin that converts your layers to CSS3.

2. Webbsy

HTML & CSS OUTPUT - Takes a Photoshop image and creates a web page coded using best practices that works in all major browsers.

3. CSS Hat

Colors, gradients, sizes, borders etc. All instantly in CSS, coverts Photoshop layer into CSS.

4. Export Kit

This converts PSD to html, CSS, WordPress etc.

5. QR Code Generator

Generates QR codes as images

6. Cut & Slice me

Export assets to different devices and export as group of png.

7. Elemente

Helpful in creating wordpress themes, convert PSD to wordpress.

8 Essential Design Tools For UX Newbies to Make Work Easier

As a UX designer, we will need to get familiar with the essentials of user experience, from user research to wireframing to collaboration to designing a final product. In this post I’m going to cover the UX design tools you’ll need for every aspect of your work as a UX designer, from beginning to end. Hopefully, it will simplify the way you work and make your lifer easier.

User Research

User Research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies.

Surveys and questionnaires are great ways to gather information. 

Survey Tool: SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is one of the best provider of survey software. There is a free version available with limitations, but the free version is still a very handy tool and allows up to 10 questions per survey. SurveyMonkey is pretty straightforward and fairly easy to use. It allows you to select from many pre-written questions. For basic surveys, I think SurveyMonkey is a great choice.

Usability Testing

Usability testing is a technique used in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on users. Usability testing is the best way to understand how real users experience your website or application.

 Usability Testing Tool: UserTesting

UserTesting is an online usability testing tool that allows to get videos of real people speaking their thoughts as they use websites, mobile apps and prototypes. The service works for landing pages, emails, ad, prototypes, live sites, and apps. You can opt to have your test designed by an experienced in-house research team, or have a project manager come on to oversee that you accomplish your goals.

Prototype Design

Wireframing tools make creating a website or application fundamentally easier. UX designers use wireframes and prototypes to create the products logic. It simplifies the communication between UX designers and clients and saves us much time on product development.

Rapid Prototyping Tool: Mockplus

Mockplus is an excellent tool to prototype app and website. It can be used to prototype for mobile, desktop and web apps quickly. Building an interactive prototype with Mockplus is much easier compared to an old prototyping tool like Axure or Justinmind. The intuitive drag-and-drop UI makes it possible to start using the tool immediately. Even the first-time users can master it without having to go over tutorials and training manuals. If you are looking for a UX tool that is cheap and allows to create interactive prototypes in a minimum of time, I recommend using Mockplus.

Collaboration

Communication is one of the critical skills of the UX designers. Want to improve communication with your team? Or work remotely but still stay in touch? That’s where collaboration tools come in.

Collaboration Tool: Red Pen

Red pen is a lightweight tool which lets you upload a file and share it with clients and team members for feedback. You can ask colleagues and clients for feedback by giving them a private link, or inviting them via email. It very easy for designers to get feedback and approve artwork in a professional manner.

Design Style Guides

Most projects can benefit from having a style guide. Using a design style guide ensures consistency throughout a project. Some style guides focus on specific topic areas such as graphic design, including typography. Website style guides cover a publication’s visual and technical aspects along with text.

Tool: Frontify

Frontify is a web design tool that helps designers create branding and style guides for their projects. The user can provide better documentation without wasting a lot of time on the process. An in-browser color picker is included along with an automatic color name proposal. What makes Frontify standout is that it is a place for itself by combining web design and development tools as well as a tidy, streamlined interface. Users can communicate quickly and gather valuable input easily.

Other Design Resource

Free Icons: iconfinder

Iconfinder is basically an icon search engine that anyone can use for free. According to Iconfinder, it now hosts the worlds largest collection of premium icons. It provides millions of beautiful icons to web designers and developers. All the icons are available to download for free in SVG, PNG, AI, or CSH. It is also an online marketplace for buying and selling premium icons.

Screen Specifications: Screen Sizes

Screensiz is very helpful to quickly find the screen specifications of the most popular devices and monitors currently on the market.

Color Picker: Adobe Color Wheel

Color selection can be one of the hardest parts of UX design, especially when you’ve just started. Adobe Color Wheel is an easy to use design tool. Upload a picture, you’re then given an accurate color palate. You can not only upload to the cloud, but can also pull your own themes, or themes created by others. This means that if you’re not feeling particularly inspired, you can have a look at themes that others have uploaded, pull one to your device, and adjust it to your tastes.

Conclusion

The primary purpose of using tools is to help us work more efficiently, so the faster you can master it the better. I hope these design tools will be helpful to you. Furthermore, there are plenty of other UX tools available, which may also be of interest. Feel free to leave any comments below.

About Author

Becky

Email: becky@jongde.com

What is logo?

In simple terms logo identifies a business in its simplest form via the use of a mark and icon.

“Justcreative.com”

Logo is the identity of the business which is memorable and recognizable it should not describe what company does. There are three basic types of logos:

1. Iconic/symbolic

2.Logo type/Word mark

3. Combination Marks

1. Iconic/symbol 

In iconic and symbol such imagery is used which convey abstract representation of the company. For example : Apple

2. Logotype/Word mark  

In common language we can say that company name is used in text format but in stylish way or bold way. Sometimes designer play with negative or positive area with in font to convey the nature of the business. For Ex: Fedex

One can see the forward arrow in the FedEx logo which conveys their type of business.

3. Combination Marks 

It is combination of text and symbol and icon which represent your company or organization. Symbol includes additional value to your logo by placing it with text. For ex: Domino’s Pizza

Next article: How to design a good logo

References: logodesignsource.com


Author: Shivin Mittal ( @MittalShivin )