The final results are good in my opinion – the color scheme is much more localized than it was before, reflecting the happy & bright colors of the Dominican Republic. I would also suggest that it is a little more technological & corporate without the cartoon dog, an icon that gave it a traditional vibe. I am sure this is something the brand consultants wanted to adjust, which make sense for a company invested in technology.

But the real story here is that it has stirred up an interesting debate within the design community circled around the question of originality.

If you view the logos below, you will see this is just a handful of very similar ideas and very similar executions – and after a quick glance you would do well to match each name with each shape from memory.

But does this really matter? Lets be honest, most businesses would reject the logo on the grounds that it looks too similar to the well known samples below, and would be fairly cross that they had been presented with a non-unique logo.

Whilst it is vitally important to never, under any circumstances, copy another design – is this problem really unavoidable? And does it really have a negative aspect of on the business?

When you consider that this logo was designed by Interbrand – the worlds largest Brand Consultancy – and no doubt involved many hours of research and focus groups – it appears that the similarities really are not much of a concern, and it’s a case that if those shoes fits – the shoe fits.

One things is for sure, originality in design is a debate that will go on and on.

Think you are brand-aware? Try out this logo quiz and see if you can put the correct name to each logo. It’s harder than it seems!

There are 24 logos from A-Z, with each letter being taken from a well-known logo. Simply put your answer in the box below the logo, if it’s correct the box will automatically turn green and the full logo will appear. If it’s wrong it will turn red – so watch your spelling!

PS: To make it even easier, each letter displayed represents the first name of that business.

Post your scores below and have fun!

Play the logo quiz now

With the World Cup finally underway (and finally starting to show some decent football) what better way to mark the occasion than with a nostalgic look back over the last 80 years to review past World Cup logos and posters. There is also a sneaky look forwards to the 2014 and 2018 World Cups!

1930 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Uruguay
Winners: Uruguay

The 1930 FIFA World Cup was the inaugural world championship for international association football teams – the FIFA World Cup. It was played in Uruguay from 13 July to 30 July.

1934 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Italy
Winners: Italy
The 1934 FIFA World Cup, or the World’s Cup^[1] as it was known then, was the second football World Cup, and was hosted by Italy from 27 May to 10 June. Italy was chosen as host by FIFA at the Stockholm congress of October 1932.

1938 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: France
Winners: Italy

The 1938 FIFA World Cup was the third staging of the World Cup, and was held in France from 4 June to 19 June. France was chosen as hosts by FIFA in August 1936. Italy retained the championship, beating Hungary 4–2 in the final.

1950 Fifa World Cup (12 Year gap was due to the War)
Hosts: Brazil
Winners: Uruguay

The 1950 FIFA World Cup, held in Brazil from 24 June to 16 July, was the fourth FIFA World Cup, and the first staged in 12 years due to World War II. Brazil was chosen as the host country by FIFA in July 1946. It was also the first tournament where the trophy was referred to as the Jules Rimet Cup, to mark the 25th anniversary of Rimet’s presidency of FIFA.

1954 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Switzerland
Winners: West Germany

The 1954 FIFA World Cup, the fifth staging of the World Cup, was held in Switzerland from 16 June to 4 July. As the year saw the 50th anniversary of FIFA, it was appropriate for football’s premier competition to be played in the home of its governing body, and Switzerland was chosen as hosts in July 1946.

1958 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Sweeden
Winners: Brazil

The 1958 FIFA World Cup, the sixth staging of the World Cup, was hosted by Sweden from 8 June to 29 June. Sweden was chosen as hosts by FIFA in June 1950. It was won by Brazil, who beat Sweden 5–2 in the final for their first title. As of 2010, this was the only time that a World Cup staged in Europe was not won by a European team.

1962 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Chile
Winners: Brazil

The 1962 FIFA World Cup, the seventh staging of the World Cup, was held in Chile from 30 May to 17 June. Chile was chosen as hostFIFA in June 1956, as the World Cup returned to the continent of South America after 12 years. It was won by Brazil, who retained the championship by beating Czechoslovakia 3–1 in the final. by

1966 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: England
Winners: England

The 1966 FIFA World Cup, the eighth staging of the World Cup, was held in England from 11 July to 30 July. England was chosen as hosts by FIFA in August 1960 to celebrate the centenary of the standardisation of football in England. England won the final, beating West Germany 4–2, giving them their first (and only) World Cup win, and becoming the first host to win the tournament since Italy in 1934.

1970 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Mexico
Winners: Brazil

The 1970 FIFA World Cup, the ninth staging of the World Cup, was held in Mexico, from 31 May to 21 June. Mexico was chosen as the host nation by FIFA in October 1964. The 1970 tournament was the first World Cup hosted in North America, and the first held outside South America and Europe. In a match-up of two-time World Cup champions, the final was won by Brazil, who beat Italy 4–1.

1974 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: West Germany
Winners: West Germany

The 1974 FIFA World Cup, the tenth staging of the World Cup, was held in West Germany from 13 June to 7 July. West Germany had been chosen in July 1966 as hosts by FIFA. The tournament marked the first time that the current trophy, the FIFA World Cup Trophy, created by the Italian sculptor Silvio Gazzaniga, was awarded.

1978 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Argentina
Winners: Argentina

The 1978 FIFA World Cup, the 11th staging of the FIFA World Cup, was held in Argentina between 1 June and 25 June. Argentina was chosen as hosts by FIFA in July 1966. The 1978 World Cup was won by Argentina who beat the Netherlands 3–1 after extra time in the final.

1982 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Spain
Winners: Italy

The 1982 FIFA World Cup, the 12th FIFA World Cup, was held in Spain from 13 June to 11 July, 1982. Spain was chosen as hosts by FIFA in July 1966. The tournament was won by Italy, after beating West Germany 3–1 in the final.

1986 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Mexico
Winners: Argentina

The 1986 FIFA World Cup, the 13th FIFA World Cup, was held in Mexico from 31 May to 29 June. It was won by Argentina (their second title after 1978), led by Diego Maradona who scored the infamous “Hand of God goal”, and also a goal voted as “Goal of the Century”, in the same quarter-final against England.

1990 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Italy
Winners: West Germany

The 1990 FIFA World Cup was the 14th FIFA World Cup, the quadrennial international football world championship tournament. It was held from 8 June to 8 July 1990 in Italy, the second country to host the event twice. Teams representing 116 national football associations from all six populated continents entered the competition, with its qualification process beginning in April 1988.

1994 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: USA
Winners: Brazil

The 1994 FIFA World Cup, the 15th staging of the FIFA World Cup, was held in the United States from June 17 to July 17 1994. The United States was chosen as hosts by FIFA on July 4, 1988. Brazil became the first nation to win four World Cup titles when they beat Italy 3-2 in a penalty shootout after the game ended 0-0 after extra-time, the first World Cup final to be decided on penalties.

1998 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: France
Winners: France

The 1998 FIFA World Cup, the 16th FIFA World Cup, was held in France from 10 June to 12 July 1998. France was chosen as host nation by FIFA on 1 July 1992. The tournament was won by France, who beat Brazil 3-0 in the final. France won their first title, becoming the seventh nation to win a World Cup.

2002 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Korea & Japan
Winners: Brazil

The 2002 FIFA World Cup was the 17th staging of the FIFA World Cup, held in South Korea and Japan from 31 May to 30 June. The two countries were chosen as hosts by FIFA in May 1996; it was the first tournament in World Cup history to be hosted by two countries.

2006 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Germany
Winners: Italy

The 2006 FIFA World Cup was the 18th FIFA World Cup, the quadrennial international football world championship tournament. It was held from 9 June to 9 July 2006 in Germany, which won the right to host the event in July 2000.

2010 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: South Africa
Winners: Final not yet played

The 2010 FIFA World Cup is the 19th FIFA World Cup, the premier international association football tournament. It is being held in South Africa, beginning on 11 June and scheduled to conclude on 11 July 2010.

2014 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Brasil
Winners: Final not yet played

The 2014 FIFA World Cup will be the 20th World Cup, an international football tournament that is expected to take place between June and July 2014 in Brazil. This will be the second time the country has hosted the competition, the first being the 1950 FIFA World Cup.

2018 Fifa World Cup
Hosts: Undecided
Winners: Final not yet played

The bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups is currently underway. These will be the 21st and 22nd editions of the FIFA World Cup. The bidding procedure to host both the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cup began in January 2009, and national associations had until 2 February 2009 to register their interest.

Having spent the last few months redesigning my website, I have been more aware than ever at web styles around the world. One of my favorite and most frequently visited haunts is over at minimalsites.com.

Unlike your average CSS Gallery site where the onus seems to be on who can collect the most submissions, minimalsites.com has a strict acceptance policy and you need to be invited before you can join in on the various discussions they have on their site.

So if your a fan of minimalist design, or your simply bored of the hectic & colorful sites on other galleries I strongly suggest checking them out.

What makes a good logo is a popular question, and an even more popular topic for bloggers!

There are many ingredients that go into designing a good logo – most logo designers agree that a good logo will be flexible, timeless, memorable, and easy to reproduce. So if you can achieve each of these things you’ve got yourself a good logo!

I could break these up into a nice little list and go through each step, however over the years I have found that by keeping everything simple, you can achieve pretty much everything I have written above. Logo design doesn’t have to involve a complicated check-list of requirements – if you keep it simple, everything else should fall into place.

Let’s look at the facts:

Timelessness. Simple logos age well because there is nothing in them to define a particular moment. Design trends are great, they keep everything looking fresh and exciting, but if you apply this to your logo designs they will look great for a year, maybe 2, but then look dated and terrible. It’s no different to fashion. I felt great in 2001 wearing my converse, khaki combats and a denim jacket strutting my stuff around London, but if I walked out now in the same outfit I would look dated and behind the times! But…if you wore the simplest outfit possible (lets say a pair of jeans with a black t-shirt) you’d be neither in fashion, or out of fashion – just timeless.

Reproduction. Simple logos reproduce well because they simple shapes are easy to reproduce! The Apple logo is a classic example of this – it’s just as clear and recognizable when it’s shrunk down on a mouse, as it is when blown up to 100ftx100ft and plastered on a billboard in New York. A funky multi-colored detailed logo will look fine on a billboard, but problems become obvious once you start trying to apply it small items like t-shirts, pen and business cards.

Memorable. This should be obvious, the simpler a design anything is, the easier it is to remember. As far as the human brain goes, shapes and patterns are no different to words – If I gave you 2 words to remember, it wouldn’t take any effort to recall these words back to me 24 hours later. However if I gave you 10 words to remember you would either need to make a conscious effort to remember them, or most likely the brain will only recall 3-5 of the words. In the business world, if a potential client goes to a trade-show, or flicks through a magazine and can remember your company name over a competitor’s – you’ve already won the first race. This is why it pains me to see overly fussy text being used in logos – it may look nice, but it’s terrible for marketing.

Flexibility. By flexibility I mean to give a flexible message. Designing a logo that is flexible in application is always one of my main goals. I want to give my clients the flexibility to place their mark on a variety of materials with a variety of messages. A company’s brand is so much more than just their logo and I think this tends to get overlooked by clients who think their logo is the only vehicle available in which to convey their corporate message. Of course a logo is only a small fraction of a brand, and a business can (and should) have different demographics, each with a different message. For example, Nike are currently running multiple campaigns, two of them are very different. One is a funky advert promoting the world cup, everything is fun and colorful; but the other advert is a serious somber piece with Tiger Woods talking about his fathers death. The logo, being simple, can be passive to these different messages and can embody the varying tone and message of other materials.

So you can see, if you keep everything simple chances are you’ll end up with a logo that is flexible, timeless, memorable, and easy to reproduce!

I recently received this years Industry Insights, which is published each year by the Design Council. It’s a supplement that details all kinds of interesting facts and figures about the design industry in general, and it often contains some interesting (and surprising) fact & figures about Freelance Designers.

I recommend every designer grabs a copy, which can be downloaded freely form their website.

To give you a taster, I have listed a few interesting results below.

• The total annual fee income of UK freelance designers was estimated to be £3.6bn for the last financial year.
  This is a great sign, because it shows that British businesses are placing their trust in independent designers more and more each year – the figure is up 22% on 2009.

• Freelance designers are less likely than design consultancies to do work abroad. 95% of freelance designers work predominantly for clients based in the UK.
  This figure surprised me, as my personal percentage is about 80% UK, and 20% overseas.
• There are 65,9001 freelance designers in the UK.
  Wow, that is a lot of competition

• Just over 60% of freelance designers work in communications design and just under half work in digital and multimedia design. The number of freelance designers working in product and industrial design has decreased by 13% since 2005.
• More than half of freelance designers have increased the number of clients that they work for over the last three years.
  Another good sign for independent designers, and more proof that businesses are gravitating away form larger design firms and the higher prices associated with them – the recession is perhaps par of the reason.

• 96% of Freelance Designers work for Private sector clients, only 47% Public Sector.
  Quite a key fact here, would be interested to see a comparison to last year but I don’t have this to hand. There is without a doubt more private sector work available, which explains the gap, but I know there is a reluctance for government to invest in small design agencies and independents for public sector work. They don’t seem to have made the leap of trust in the same way that the private sector has.

• UK design industry has grown since 2005, despite the recession

• There are 232,0001 designers, 29% more than in 2005 and earnings have increased by £3.4bn. The combined budget of in-house teams and fee income of freelances and consultancies is £15bn.

You can download and read the full document by clicking here [PDF]

From today it seems the almighty Google has started rolling out a slightly new version of it’s logo.

The most noticeable change is the amount of drop-shadow being employed by the logo. The drop-shadow, is often the one thing that designers detest when talking about the Google logo because it’s most often associated with non-designers and tends to be the first thing people do when they get their hands on a copy of Photoshop™. (It also has reproduction issues which we will cover in a separate topic)

Also toned down are the bevel and emboss effects. The highlights have been dimmed and the shadows lightened – the overall result is a much more traditional logotype, with less cheesy effects.

I would guess that the idea here is to gradually tidy the logo up over a period of years – it’s already gone through quite a few revisions and they seem to be leading to a more functional and corporate logo.

Behance have just released a nice little notebook designed especially for graphic artists.

The dotted grid provides a clear grid for accurate sketching, but without the imposing lines and colours of a traditional gridded sketchpad. The pages are made of 80lb Premium Blend paper and it comes in a semi-hard suede cover.

It’s only $14 and available to buy here.

I am off to buy one myself!

“How much is a logo worth”, and “what does a logo cost” are two of the most frequent questions I get asked by clients and other designers.

The truth is that there is no single price that guarantees a good logo; but there is a general rule which is that all jobs are calculated on the same  ratio: Increased Development Time = Increased costs. That can be said for nearly every product or service, which is why the term “you get what you pay for” is generally (within reason) quite true. So how come people can offer a logo for £25?

So if you see a logo for £25.99 you know it’s going to be made pretty quickly. Surprisingly though, the businesses that charge £25 – £250 (you can always find them advertising on Google) are more often than not actually quite large organisations running healthy returns.

This is because they tend to have more sales staff than designers, and the sales staff are the guys who get the largest cut and the company is often built around them. The designers themselves get only a fraction of the overall cost, (often around 25%) so it doesn’t take too much thought to see how much effort a designer is going to put into your logo if your paying them so little. Pay peanuts and get monkeys I think is the term….

They also tend to have different levels of service such as Gold, Silver and Bronze – with the more money your willing to pay them, the more logos they will let you ‘see’. Because of such low fees, designers tend to recycle quite a lot. So if a client orders a Gold package, he will get, lets say 10 logos to choose from. This means at the end of the project there are 9 logos that have been designed, but unused. So the next person to come along and order a logo, stands a good chance of getting some of these leftovers.

This is why you’ll find a lot of the logos in the portfolios of budget companies, tend to be nondescript and quite generic. A lot of swooshes, globes and flying dots It’s perhaps a bit harsh, but of all the designers I have met who work for these businesses tend to be people that are proficient in Adobe software, rather than people with actual experience in the design industry.

This business model tends to attract clients that do not place much (if any) emphasis on marketing and see design in general as an expense, rather than an investment.

Those clients that are a little more educated in the merits of branding & marketing tend to gravitate more towards the independent designer, or the small agency. The main difference between these guys is that these designers tend to have followed a more traditional path into the industry than their budget counterparts (university or art school educated, followed by employment either in a design agency, or as part of a design-team in an organization).

The one thing that really separates these designers and agencies from their cheaper competitors is in the time spent researching and developing logos. Most jobs will typically start with some kind of Q&A followed by research into competitors & target audiences, and these things tend to take time. For want of a better definition, perhaps the best way to sum it up is that this method is more of a “here is what we recommend, and this is why it’s going to be beneficial to your business” rather than “here is an assortment of generic designs we made earlier, pick the one you like best and pay me”.

I am a firm believer in involving the client in the design process, but the basic design of a logo should be based on reason and good design principles, and that can only come from an experienced design professional – you can’t get this from a 24 hour logo.

Remember, good design is business!

I had an email this week from a design student asking what tools I used, so here is a quick rundown.

• Apple Mac Pro
• 24″ Apple Cinema Display
• Wacom Tablet (Mainly used for photo retouching, and mocking up product concepts)
• Full Creative Suite of Applications (I try to update every 2 releases, but using the latest version of in design seems problematic for many printers)
• Sketch Book
• Sharp Pencils
• Pantone Colour Guides (A must!)
• Good selection of design books
• Good selection of fellow designers

A  computer is obviously an absolute necessity for a graphic designer but it doesn’t have to be expensive. If your just starting out on your own, the most important purchase will probably be software. As a minimum, you need something to handle vectors, something to handle photos and something to handle page layout. Illustrator, Photoshop & InDesign are the natural choices, although there are a several good open-source software’s available, and some great designers are using them on a  regular basis.

What you run your software on isn’t as important as what your running – Photoshop is exactly the same on a Mac as it is on a PC and if you can save a few pennies by using a PC  then this will free up funds that can be used elsewhere. Personally I find working on a Mac a lot less stressful and I much prefer the way they render type; but it’s not a deal-breaker – especially for a startup.

A swatch-book is an important addition, and will ensure that your fully aware of colours your using in any logo design work!

Finally, a good circle of fellow designers can be the most valuable tool at your disposal. Having people available to review your work before sending it off to clients is very handy, especially if your just starting out and unsure of your work.