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Branding Early

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Startups most commonly bypass branding, initially, to focus on product. Is this the best way to structure a startups priority list? If you look into some of the most current successful startups, then often times you will find they’ve directed a lot of energy and focus into early branding and design. This means much more than solidifying your logo and website UI/UX. In most cases successful startups attack branding before launching a product or service.

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Logo/Brands, A Spectum of Colors

This is a quick yet interesting observation on some of today’s more popular brands. It illustrates the gamut of color across multiple logo types. I’m sure some of the color choices are just happenstance but the color chart is pretty slick! logo color spectrum

This is the Best Font Tool Ever

The Best Font Tool Ever - Wordmark.it

At the outset of a logo design project about 99% of the time I start with type. I can spend hour upon hour, even days exploring typography. This is where Wordmark.it comes in. It is a free, online service that allows users to get a quick snap-shot of fonts installed on a computer. Users can simply type a word or phrase into a text box on the Wordmark.it website. Wordmark.it will then display that word or phase via the fonts that are installed on your computer. Complete awesomeness!

Whether Fine Artist, Photographer, Web Designer or Print Design, the Vignelli Cannon is a Must-Read for all Creative Types

The Vignelli Canon
Italian Designer Massimo Vignelli gives us a snap shot of his understanding of what makes good design, it’s basic principles and rules. He gives us various examples of practice in product, graphic and information design.

“We design things which we think are semantically correct and syntactically consistent but if, at the point of fruition, no one understands the result, or the meaning of all that effort, the entire work is useless.” - Massimo Vignelli

This may be old news to some of you but I thought it well worth the a post. Grab this fantastic 96 page read. The PDF version is free and it’s a quick, easy read.

ROI Tools that Actually Look Good—A Challenging Website Design

ROI Tool Website Design - Korrio's Cost Savings Calculator
A few months ago our friends at Korrio (and a great client), commissioned us to create an ROI tool that demonstrates the cost-benefits of using their product. It had to speak to a no-techie audience, be simple yet effective and give the user multiple options for sharing the resulting information.

I don’t know about you but when I think about “Return on Investment” tools I think about dry, left-brained analytics tools – no fun for us right-brianers right? As I started doing research I came a across a beautiful ROI project by Google, appropriately called, “Gone Google”. Inspired by what they had created, as well as a few others, we dove right into design.

Yes this project was a bit of a challenge but fortunately the client let us get creative with it and we like that! In terms of coding, fortunately those genius Korrio developers were able to connect the final dots and launch what I think is a really well-rounded web design project. The resulting PDF might be the most impressive part so be sure to take a look.

The W3C Gave HTML5 a New Logo but What’s That Mean?

The New HTML5 Logo
In a recent article via WebMonkey, Scott Gilbertson states that “HTML5 already enjoys more buzz that a web developer left alone in the back of a Mountain Dew truck (it even has it’s own posse), the only problem is that the buzz makers conflate just about every emerging web technology under the HTML5 umbrella. Purists have long decried headlines proclaiming the glory of HTML5 above an article about JavaScript and CSS 3, but now the one group that ought to know best appears to throwing in the towel and embracing the HTML5 hype.

While the new HTML5 logo looks good, the FAQ that accompanies it is troubling. According to the W3C, the logo is “a general-purpose visual identity for a broad set of open web technologies, including HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and others.”

The logo’s not spectacular but I think it’s a good and sound design. I have a feeling however that, it may fade into the abyss. Wouldn’t you strip the logo/brand off of your site/collateral once your audience realized it doesn’t actually mean anything? Gilbertson elaborates, “Lumping everything together is as silly as a carpenter referring to every tool in their toolkit as “a hammer.” I totally agree. Read the full article here…

World’s Smallest Logo? - Probably

From Wired’s Playbook Blog, Erik Malinowski posted a short article about an engineer from the University of Utah who recreated the logo at about the width of a blond, human hair (blond happens to be the thinnest). That’s freakin’ tiny! See the full article here.

Microsoft OEM Brand & Logo Design—It’s Great Working with our Redmond Neighbors

Microsoft OEM Logos

Wow, get this, after 28 various marks we then honed in on the final. From there we created 192 variations of the same logo. This, of course, included localization, 1 color and print/rgb versions. Once the logo was complete we had the pleasure of working on additional collateral which helped to define the look and feel of the new brand, namely the style guide, website mastheads, a power point template and business cards, to name a few.

 

Pixelube Logo Design Gets Published Again – Kudos!

Intoxica logoWe’ve just been informed that one of our latest logos (Intoxica) has been selected for LogoLounge’s, soon to be published book LogoLounge Volume 6.

Not to toot our horns but this years lot was made up of an incredibly competitive judging session with over 34,000 logos entered for consideration. We’ve also been informed that your our work has been chosen for inclusion in the new book by an international panel of judges. This year’s panel included, Bart Crosby of Crosby Associates, Hans Hulsbosch of Hulsbosch, Jeannie Servaas of Saffron Brand Consultants Inc., Jessica Hische of Jessica Hische, Marius Ursache of Grapefruit, Sherwin Schwartzrock of Schwartzrock Graphic Arts, Silvio Giorgi of Latinbrand, and Tessa Westermeyer of Landor.

We love to design logos!

iPad Application Design – Pixelube’s First!

BigOven iconA couple years ago we had the pleasure of meeting and working with the folks over at BigOven. We collaborated to create the new brand and web site for BigOven.com. Since then the site has grown by leaps and bounds. They’ve launched a variety of new features, released an iPhone app and over the weekend BigOven debuted its new iPad application.

I have yet to purchase an iPad but it has been a true pleasure to work on the UI design for BigOven’s application. Due to a dedicated team made up of a handful of super-smart folks, we were lucky enough to be one of the featured apps in the iPad store upon this weekend’s debut.

The BigOven iPad application has a variety of great features. The app taps into BigOven’s database of over 170,000 plus recipes contributed by a gamut of users ranging from the novice to the professional chef. Users are empowered to:

  • Look up any recipe or post your own, free, to BigOven.com
  • Create grocery lists from recipes
  • Sync grocery lists via the web, iPhone and or Android
  • Post and organize your own recipes via BigOven.com
  • Post and read user-generated recipe reviews
  • View and post photos and much more…

ipad-anim

We try not to toot our horns much over here but felt compelled to quote our big BigOven client:

“Vince, I’m such a fan of the clean, crisp look you’ve created, from the logo itself to the colors, and the brand signature that you created just rules the roost. The graphic design of this app makes it really something special. ~Steve Murch”


You can take a quick peek of the application here.

All of the hype wrapped around the new iPad has been interesting, to say the least. Especially interesting are the variety of press and reviews wrapped around our application. They started to trickle in last Monday. If you’re interested, you can see a few of them here:

Oh, and of course, if you’re interested in purchasing the BigOven app, you can do so here:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/170-000-recipes-grocery-list/id364151212?mt=8

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Pixelube is a design studio based in Seattle Washington. We specialize in logo, identity, web and print design—design that sparks interest, builds equity and generates revenue.

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