Many times an agency will mock up a design direction in order to get a client to sign off on it. Once they have it approved they’ll approach me with their rough idea and want me to flesh it out into it’s final form. This type of project usually means I’ll be leveraging both my design and illustration skills to pull it off.

This project will take you through the entire creative process I used to pull off this illustrative logo design, from shooting my own photo reference material to refining my vector artwork with precision.

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Logo Illustration

Smashing Magazine has collected a ton of resources for your typographical and fontological needs.

Really cool.

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50 Helpful Typography Tools And Resources

From the Typekit website:

“Just add a line of JavaScript to your markup, tell us what fonts you want to use, and then craft your pages the way you always have. Except now you’ll be able to use real fonts. This really is going to change web design.”

Sounds pretty cool. Simple, flexible, and cool.

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Typekit

It’s extremely important that Logos are created with versatility in mind. As the main component of a company’s corporate identity, the logo acts as the cornerstone of their visual brand. This means it must be reproducible using a huge variety of formats and processes while maintaining the integrity of the logo as it is utilized. Logos may be printed on anything like small business cards and pens to extremely large billboards and signage. They need to work well using traditional print methods like offset lithography and screen printing for T-Shirts, as well as other things the buyer may want like rubber stamps, stickers and embroidered golf shirts. Of course, it must also look fabulous on screen for use on websites and other pixel based media. It’s a good idea to test your logo file at a monitor resolution of 72ppi at an inch or so wide to see what issues may pop up.

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6 Things to keep in mind when designing a logo (iStockphoto.com)

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A Tale of Two Mice | THE RUSSIANS USED A PENCIL

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Illustrative Lettering 3 – Fa La La La

A terrific resource for design professionals. Tips for both the technical side of the biz and the people side.

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Hack 2 Work | Core77.com

Of all the things that could have drawn me into football when I was a wee lad, it feels a bit odd to admit, the team logos on the helmets were the most magnetic.

There was something about the colors, the compactness of the images, and the way that they not only differentiated who was playing each other on the field, but also instantly communicated the identity of the team.

But I’ve never thought critically about the logo choices before, nor how they could be changed to be even more effective.

But Ken Carbone’s post over at Fast Company does just that. He selects the best designs, and the worst, and then he tries to improve the bottom three: The Patriots, The Buccaneers, and the Redskins.

They’re great and all, but none of them are as interesting as the ones that Pink Tentacle’s camera wielder snapped. Like this one with the urinals.

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Good Design Awards (via Pink Tentacle)

I’m terrible with color. Terrible. So I intend to try to improve a little by coloring the cover images for the next season of Q-Burger. And one of the tools I’m going to use is Adobe’s free web-based Kuler (they pronounce it “cooler”).

Designers can browse thousands of color themes created by the Kuler community; including the ability to search for color themes by tags, themes, hex color, and more. So searching for spring will likely bring up a list of bright and cheery color combos appropriate for that flower landscaping brochure you’re working on.

But it doesn’t stop there. Users can also create new themes based on colors in an existing image you upload from your desktop. Once you’ve found a color scheme you like, you can rate it, add it to your favorites, export it as an Adobe Swatch Exchange file for use in any Adobe Creative Suite app, or add it directly to your CS4 app Swatches panel. You do so with a simple drop-down menu in the Kuler panel next to the swatch name.

I’ve already used it a bit on some web projects, but not extensively. I think it might be a pretty useful crutch for we color-confused folk.

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Coloring with Adobe Kuler | Macworld