Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 7:16 am Post subject: Snowblind
This is a logotype for a fictitious company. It has one obvious problem in that logos must look good at any size and this one would not work below about 4 inches on screen or below 1 inch in print, because the white dots would be lost. It would also not work when printed on cheap paper, because the ink would bleed and the dots would, again, be lost. The solution would be to develop multiple versions of the same logo for different applications with appropriate dot sizes.
the typing is only half visable, but from what i can see i think it looks kinda basic, for a logo you might want to create something more complex i don't know, this is easy to redo just a simple bleu/white gradient, and then the typing, the snow can also be easily done with a grunge brush if you have the right one and you adjust the spacing of your brush!
don't mean to bring you down, but it's a lil simple for a logo!
but that's just my opinion
You're entitled to your opinions, and I appreciate any and all comments. However, "isn't it a bit simple?" is something designers hear too often, so I have to say something about this common misconception.
Logos are *supposed* to be simple, or at least apparently simple. Look at McDonald's, IBM, Nike, etc. My concern about my design here is that it's too complicated, not too simple. The small detail may be too distracting, not clean enough.
"Design creep" is a big danger - adding things just because you're afraid people won't think you worked very hard if the design is too simple.
The truth is, most designs start off more complicated than they need to be, and the "professional" look of pro designs usually comes from the distillation of the original idea down to its essentials - the removing of elements, rather than their addition.
For instance, I used to have the silhouette of white mountains against a sky (in a similar gradient to the type) in the background, but decided it wasn't necessary, and I didn't like the trapped white space; I prefered to leave it open at the top.
As for this being "easy to recreate," it wouldn't be hard to get something that looks similar, but more work went into this than you'd guess.
1) Getting the colours just right took several hours of fussing, although, to be honest, I'm still not sure they're "just right."
2) There is subtle three-dimensionality to the type, created by careful work with a custom spatter brush. Notice that there is an apparent wind direction from right to left, to give the feeling of a head-on collision with the left-to-right direction of the type. There is also the illusion of creases or crevasses where the letters meet each other.
3) The type itself is hand-kerned and significantly customised - in particular, the ligatures between the S and N, the O and W, and the protruding crossbar of the B.
4) Getting the right amount of cropping wasn't trivial either (yes, the fact that the type is only part-visible is deliberate). It look a lot of getting up from my chair and looking at the text from across the room to get the right balance between legibility and the "buried in the snow" look.
If you still don't like it, that's fine. But "simple" is usually a compliment in design circles.
i couldnt agree more about the simplicity thing I amctually was getting ready to say the same thing, simple is good and not enough people keep logos simple anymore.
onto my critique
ALthough I like the look a lot, the word blind is very hard to read, the b gets read as a r and the L gets lost, I had to sit there and try and figure it out, then finally after I looked at the file name I got it.
maybe you could take the blind part and make it on a angle slope with the b above the w and the rest of the word slanting towards the ground, that way the bottom of the b would show and it would make it less linier. anyway there you have it
Ah, good feedback. I was wondering about legibility. It isn't a huge issue if things are hard to make out - legibility doesn't always correlate to recognition, and it was sort of intentional to make "blind" kind of hard to see... medium being the message and all.
However, if things are MIS-read, that's a bigger problem. That is, I don't mind if people see "SNOW?????" at first, but I do mind if they see "SNOWRUND," or something. I was mostly worried about the L-I being read as a U, which is why I chose Insignia as the font; the serif on the foot of the L helps a bit with that. I didn't even think about the B looking like an R.
Text on a slant is hard to pull off... it usually looks amateurish. It might work here, but it would be tricky. Maybe moving the text up a hair would be enough - seeing the bottom half of the B curve in, even only a little, would probably be enough that people wouldn't mistake it for an R.
I think i used the wronge word when i said simple, because when i said that i was thinking about logo's like ibm, etc
but what i mean is!
if you see a professional logo once, you will be able to remeber it the next time you see it! i just think for a logo, the text is too big and apart from the snow it just doesn't stand out!
Quote:
4) Getting the right amount of cropping wasn't trivial either (yes, the fact that the type is only part-visible is deliberate). It look a lot of getting up from my chair and looking at the text from across the room to get the right balance between legibility and the "buried in the snow" look.
if it's your intention to make it look like the letters are in the snow, then shouldn't the gradiant background be inverted so that the blue is in the top of the image and the white on the bottom, because the snow flakes you have on the typing is white!
to me it doesn't look like it blurred in the snow!
Quote:
"Design creep" is a big danger - adding things just because you're afraid people won't think you worked very hard if the design is too simple.
your image had that effect on me, just the overall look while the font was to hard to read and therefore i said simple!
i didn't mean to offend you when i said that it looked basic, but that's the way i see it! and i gave you my honest opinion!
i could also have said that it looks great, and asked you to comment on an image i might have posted But i think that's not fair!
Don't worry, I'm not offended. The last thing I need is a bunch of people saying "Good job, now review mine!" It just sounded like you were saying that more complex = good for logo design, which is the opposite of the truth.
The gradient is there to give a clear bottom to the design, so that the cropped text doesn't look like it got cut off by mistake. It's also intended to give a bit of dimension to the background, maybe as if the text is sitting in a hole, with snow blowing over it and covering it up. Shadows on snow tend to be that sort of blue-grey colour.
Maybe you're right that there's a better way to evoke the idea of being buried in the snow. However, I tried putting the gradient at the top when I was working on the design the first time, and it looks awful. The letters end up looking like they got cut off in printing, not cropped deliberately, and there's the same trapped space problem I had when trying to put a landscape in the background.
Maybe what I need is to make the bottom edge uneven, with white space below. That would evoke mounds of snow, but might be getting too complicated again.
Joined: 05 Mar 2003
Posts: 3987
Location: Cheltenham, UK
Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 1:58 pm Post subject:
It's illegible for the most part and is not really a logo per se rather a logotype.
You have pretty much disregarded all common laws on designing for identities. I would concentrate as you mentioned in an earlier post about distilling your ideas further. Design rarely starts on a computer, but rather a pencil and paper, it looks like you have ignored this step.
The key to good design is that (as you again assert) is that it should be transferable across a broad range of mediums. Design your logo/logotype in black and white only, if it looks good at various sizes then by all means add some colour.
It's no good telling us that you understand the principles of good design (as it seems you might) and then go and show none of the lessons you have learnt.
The biggest concern for me is that the bottom of the lettering is cut off and this obscures the L and the I and makes it guesswork to tell the word.
Also the concept apart from the 'noise' has little to do with snowblindness. _________________ If life serves you lemons, make lemonade!
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