I got my new logo yesterday, and I have to admit I really love it!
What do you guys think?
My question is.. Why do you have the last part of your name in a different font? I think having Photography in a different font "works", but having your name randomly change is weird.
If the bird and branch have a special meaning to you and your business great, if its just to look cute.. I would scrap it. Cause the bird looks a lot like the twitter bird. Like it was said earlier, the logo of the business takes a long time to really develop something that will last a lifetime.
I had a logo that I paid $20 for, thought it was really cool and stuff.. I went with the cheapest online design place I could find.. but it had NOTHING to do with me or my business at all. I finally found a professional designer based in Tennessee to do my logo (which I am VERY pleased with). Spent like $250 on it I think. Worth every penny.
Don't remember if i posted mine or not, can't find my own post so heres mine:
Mine is very similar to yours. I welcome comments. This design is in Photoshop and I can change out the pictures in the filmstrip for different occasions or to refresh periodically.
Mine is very similar to yours. I welcome comments. This design is in Photoshop and I can change out the pictures in the filmstrip for different occasions or to refresh periodically.
Looks dated to me and do you really think you can read the pictures and the text bellow the film strip? I can hardly read it now. I don't care for the font you're using in your name either. Looks amateur-ish to me, sorry.
Mine is very similar to yours. I welcome comments. This design is in Photoshop and I can change out the pictures in the filmstrip for different occasions or to refresh periodically.
I agree with the previous poster about the dated look of your card.
There is no reason to clutter your card with two URLs; your blog is available from your navbar so a separate URL is not needed.
You also might consider using an email address that matches your URL. That gives a more professional feel to your card and site.
I created these myself and went to Staples and got the glossy style business cards. I didn't want to pay for 250 photos of the same design, and I had these glossy business cards sitting around. They look like they were done at a store. However, the iPhone photo doesn't give it justice..
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The background is black. They may look slightly grayish or have a color cast because of the way I uploaded them. These were done at OvernightPrints. They messed up the first two orders and about 1/3 of the cards had major defects. They were very nice and reprinted the order a second time (which they messed up). I got an email from the CEO telling me why the issue was occuring (all black + uv coating + humidity + stacking = bad) and promised the next order would be hand approved and would be perfect. To his word, they arrived and were flawless. Great company. Highly recommend.
Business Logo C&C
Okay, so for a long time now Prezwoodz and I have been trying to make a logo for our company (Azimuth Adventure Photography) and haven't been able to come up with anything we like. I put this one together yesterday, so it's a first draft, and we're looking for thoughts from more people out there who can give us some creative insight too!
What I have is this:
The intent with this will be to use it in our branding all over our website, our photos, letterhead, shirts, and all the usual stuff. Is it TOO simple? Does it need color? Gradients? Shadows? NSEW lettering? A round border?
We were shooting for simplicity, and I feel we have it here. It also includes a little of our name with the compass - Azimuth - and ties that in with Adventure in a steep mountain peak. It doesn't include photography because we didn't have any ideas that managed all three plus simplicity. It also leaves things open down the road as we expand into further branches of media such as video.
For video, we're envisioning a short intro clip of a very up close climber sillhouette working his way higher, and then a quick zooming out into the logo itself and our name. We're getting into video a bit more lately, so that versatility will be good.
As a watermark it sort of blends in to dark photos, but stands out nicely in color or lighter ones, as seen here. Also, I haven't figured out how to really integrate the text into it, and could use some ideas on that too.
Any help will be greatly appreciated! It's good to finally have an idea to take someplace, we're just a bit at a loss for where to go with this or if we even need to take it any further at all. Thanks for looking!
It's a start. I'm not sure I like the mountain (is it a mountain?) with your compass rose graphic. I take it it's supposed to be slightly tilted. I would either increase that or make it straight. A good logo should work without color (black and white...no shades of gray), no gradients or drop shadows. You need to incorporate your text as you design your graphic for your logo.
I'm trying to come up with something positive to say, but I'm afraid it just doesn't work for me. Looks like some kind of cartoon action book weapon.
The thing is, there are companies that specialise in designing logos and branding, they have very clever people working for them that do nothing but logos. The best logos are the ones you look at and think, 'now why didn't I think of that', and that's the point, you didn't think of it because your not one of these people.
I hope I don't sound too negative, its just that graphic design is something that everyone thinks they can do but unfortunately most can't (do it well).
I think people often get too caught up in their business cards, logos and all that instead of getting on with other things that really matter.
That said, your graphic does nothing for me at all.
First impression is it remids me of one of those things the police or James Bond would put on the road to blow out the bad guy tyres.
It also says nothing to me that would relate to or remind me of photography.
Remember whatever you come up with, it has to be put on everything... Cards, pics, letter heads, advertisements, polo shirts, caps etc.
It also has to be highly recogniseable. I think your current graphic is hard to recognise and will easily get lost on photos and text etc.
Also remember to create a mega huge file of the logo so you can put it on big stuff like signage without it falling apart.
Many people start off with something that looks good on screen but then dosen't have the resoloution to be upscaled and looks like crap when you try. Do it huge to start and then downsize from there.
I don't think you need something Kitch like a camera outline or a lens or whatever but to me this graphic is awkward, uneasy and just dosen't stand out enough.
It looks like a logo, you must have had some reason for the design you ended up with. I don't think a logo has to "say" or mean anything at all. It's more important that it be unique and recognizable.
To me it looks like nothing I've seen before and I can't even begin to figure out what it means, but I'm sure I'll recognize it if I see it again. I think having people recognize it again is more important than anything else.
Your logo means about as much to me as the Nike logo did when I first saw it. It didn't even give you a hint that it is about shoes, but it acquired it's meaning by having Nike plaster it on everything they did.
Likewise Kodak is a completely meaningless and madeup name, that acquired it's meaning by being plastered on everything Kodak did. It's hard to think of a more recognizable logo if you want to call it that, when film was king, than that Yellow that Kodak put on all their film boxes and just about everything else. It had no meaning and not even a shape, just that swash of Yellow and you knew it was Kodak.
I think the badge logo for Cadillac cars is overly complicated and a bit garish, and looks like it was designed by a commitee, but I recognize it the instant I see it.
It's good to have a back story for a logo even if it isn't true. If someone asks you can tell it to them and it will just help cement that logo in their mind. Borland software did that with their "Frank Borland" in their advertising. You could put the "story" behind your logo in the About area of your web site. "P and I were up late one night after drinking too much coffee and we saw a flash of light outside the tent so we..." sort of thing.
It's sort of like "You can say whatever you want about me, just spell my name right."
But do you like it? You will have to plaster it on everything and once it's out there changing it is very hard.
Any help will be greatly appreciated! It's good to finally have an idea to take someplace, we're just a bit at a loss for where to go with this or if we even need to take it any further at all. Thanks for looking!
Interesting perspective Dan, and you're absolutely right when you say that a logo only becomes recognisable as a logo belonging to a brand over a period of time.
The Nike logo may not look like much, but I'll bet my house that Nike had a team of top graphics bods working on it for several months. It may not have meant anything to start, but it has a timeless simplicity that has allowed it to fit in with all of their branding and products up to now, and probably for all eternity. They just change the colour, size and placing to suit it's use.
To me that's the key of a good logo, it can be scaled to any size and still look good, it can change colour and still look good and it can fit in with any letterhead, card, photo or product it is placed on. But most imortantly, you have to like it in a year, five years or even 50 years from now.
....and that is why they are so damned difficult to get right.
I'm trying to come up with something positive to say, but I'm afraid it just doesn't work for me. Looks like some kind of cartoon action book weapon.
The thing is, there are companies that specialise in designing logos and branding, they have very clever people working for them that do nothing but logos. The best logos are the ones you look at and think, 'now why didn't I think of that', and that's the point, you didn't think of it because your not one of these people.
I hope I don't sound too negative, its just that graphic design is something that everyone thinks they can do but unfortunately most can't (do it well).
Sorry
Chris
Chris, no offense taken, I agree with you entirely and this is why we've had a photography business running for two years now without a logo. We have never been able to make anything remotely good, and believe me we've tried. Now we're getting to the point where we NEED one, but we still don't have that great of a budget, so we're trying to do this ourselves, but we certainly recognize that we're not good at it. That's why I'm reaching out.
By the way, who is a good choice for logo and branding designs? I've looked at a couple options, but I certainly don't know where I ought to go first.
I've had a lot of good input from here and TPPF where I've posted this, so thanks to everyone who has replied! For my next bit of reworking I'm thinking of remaking the mountain entirely to try to make it a little less sharp and mean looking and more like a sleek logo, and maybe trying it with and without the compass rose. We'll see how it goes! Thanks again!
I'm trying to come up with something positive to say, but I'm afraid it just doesn't work for me. Looks like some kind of cartoon action book weapon.
The thing is, there are companies that specialise in designing logos and branding, they have very clever people working for them that do nothing but logos. The best logos are the ones you look at and think, 'now why didn't I think of that', and that's the point, you didn't think of it because your not one of these people.
I hope I don't sound too negative, its just that graphic design is something that everyone thinks they can do but unfortunately most can't (do it well).
What Chris said. It looks unbalanced. It is not abstract enough to fall under the Nike paradigm. It looks like you just laid something on top of a compass rose and hoped for the best.
Ok, I'm going out on a limb here but I've had a go at it for you. Basic idea is to create a logo that integrates with the name, in this case a mountain profile (rough and rugged) forming the 'A' of Azimuth. Very very simple profile. Two slight variations, and shown on a dark and light background (important for working with your website and letterheads etc).
Not the most original concept, but sometimes seeing some ideas will spark something in your own mind, even if you hate them. Hope it gets the creative juices flowing.
Ok, I'm going out on a limb here but I've had a go at it for you. Basic idea is to create a logo that integrates with the name, in this case a mountain profile (rough and rugged) forming the 'A' of Azimuth. Very very simple profile.
I think you should go on your own to make you logo. I wouldn't worry about the "design" quality, just sit back for a week or two and if you like it go with it and then plaster it everywhere. It's about making that shape stick to you.
I think your current choice if fine. If I went on an adventure with you and you gave me a coffee cup with that logo on it, I'm sure some of my friends was ask "What the heck is the crazy thing on your coffee cup?" What more could you ask for from a logo?
I don't think an small shop should go to designer. Maybe use a graphic artist to clean things up. The cost is nowhere near the benefit for a small shop. I know I'm a lonely voice in the wind here...
But I've gone with both the designer and the industrial designer thing in the past for projects in the past... I've been in charge of both software and hardware development departments.
Money isn't the issue, in the end you have decide if what they did with works in your market. And I'll guarentee they will have nowhere the understanding your market that you do.
Outside designers don't always come up with something that works. What they do come up with though is a bill to charge you for another try. If you go through the "try, write check, try again, change designer" loop enough times you will end up with something that is graphically stunning and might even work in your market. But will it give you more market share than the logo you put together yourself? If you really think so spend the bucks.
I guess I'm cynical. One of the other things I've ended up doing a lot is showing computer newbe's how to use software. All those incredibly well drawn icons... new users are clueless as to what they mean. Once you show them "push this button to do that" the will remember the image, but no matter how clever that image was done it has no meaning.
There was an eletric utility in the area that had a really "clever" logo. I happed to know a number of people in the utility and asked them what the logo was. They had no idea, some of them called it a rubber duck but they weren't sure why the company had chosen it. It turns out it was a sine wave, filled in, viewed from an off-angle perspective so it didn't quite look like a sine wave. People in the area did associate the logo with the company but of course had no idea what it ment.
A company I did some work for realized there web site wasn't clicking with there customers. The ended up spending $1M+ for a professional redesign. The results were worse in terms of customer response.
Wasn't it NBC or some other US TV network that recently spent something like $10M to redo their logo but ended up throwing it all away in the end?
You know your market. Make a couple of more stabs at a design. Go to some people in your market... don't listen to what they say, look at how they react.
The contrarian is leaving soapbox for now, thanks for listening.
Okay, so for a long time now Prezwoodz and I have been trying to make a logo for our company (Azimuth Adventure Photography) and haven't been able to come up with anything we like. I put this one together yesterday, so it's a first draft, and we're looking for thoughts from more people out there who can give us some creative insight too!
Good points all around. I'm convinced (actually have been for some time ) that I'm not good at graphic design, and if I can get someone else to do the whole project for me I'll be better off. I like the idea of someone working up the logo, color scheme, and associated branding for me, because I fumble in the dark with that stuff for sure. Right now we're two years old and we have no logo, and our color scheme is a smugmug template.
Does anyone know a good place to go for such things? And will an established company offer me anything better than the logo contest websites out there like worth1000.com and 99designs.com? At the moment I'm kind of leaning toward that avenue, since the results I'm seeing are pretty good as far as I can tell, and the price can be pretty reasonable. I haven't yet priced a design company though, so I'm looking to do that and see how they compare.
A lot of my friends have used Logo Design Team and have had great luck. The prices are great and they are super fast. Plus you get designs from more than one designer. Check 'em out.
I don't believe I follow. You choose a price and that determines how many designers will turn in their designs to you. They are turned in to you in a low res JPEG format, you say which ones you like/don't like and have them make changes (if any). Then they send the changes back... you confirm that you like the logo and then they send you a link to download it in about seven high res formats. Then you are able to change the color, size, and so on with those files. Does that answer your question?
Okay, so revisiting this, as much as I'm convinced I'm no good at this, Kelsey isn't giving up yet.
We got some good input over at TPPF, so we worked with that and got a couple different results. Kelsey worked up this one here:
Here's my take on the mountain/path idea. For starters I made mine curvy as opposed to Kelsey's more edgy design. Then I moved into coloring for it, and started out with a natural scene:
I'm not a big fan of that, so I tweaked it more to a brown:
And leaning toward a northern theme, an icy blue one. I like this one, but then we may have some trouble integrating it into a website layout that we like, since we won't be going pastel blue for the whole thing. Or I might be totally wrong there.
Now our current website (www.azimuthadventure.com) is darker grays, not because we chose them specifically, but because it was a simple smugmug theme and we personally lean toward dark to show off the photos. We're not attached to the dark colorlessness, and we especially want to set a color scheme for our branding that we'll stick with. Here's the icy one reflected in black, and then white:
So does this work? And comparing my curves to the edges of Kelsey's above? And if something like this is at least halfway tolerable, is the direction I'm going with the colors going to work? I haven't quite decided what sort of coloring we'll want to go with yet. Once I get that I'll move into some text...
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My question is.. Why do you have the last part of your name in a different font? I think having Photography in a different font "works", but having your name randomly change is weird.
If the bird and branch have a special meaning to you and your business great, if its just to look cute.. I would scrap it. Cause the bird looks a lot like the twitter bird. Like it was said earlier, the logo of the business takes a long time to really develop something that will last a lifetime.
I had a logo that I paid $20 for, thought it was really cool and stuff.. I went with the cheapest online design place I could find.. but it had NOTHING to do with me or my business at all. I finally found a professional designer based in Tennessee to do my logo (which I am VERY pleased with). Spent like $250 on it I think. Worth every penny.
http://kathyrayphotography.blogspot.com/
Mine is very similar to yours. I welcome comments. This design is in Photoshop and I can change out the pictures in the filmstrip for different occasions or to refresh periodically.
SmugMug: www.randyjacksonimages.com
Email: randyjacksonimages@cox.net
Photography Blog: http://randyonphotography.com
Looks dated to me and do you really think you can read the pictures and the text bellow the film strip? I can hardly read it now. I don't care for the font you're using in your name either. Looks amateur-ish to me, sorry.
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There is no reason to clutter your card with two URLs; your blog is available from your navbar so a separate URL is not needed.
You also might consider using an email address that matches your URL. That gives a more professional feel to your card and site.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
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Okay, so for a long time now Prezwoodz and I have been trying to make a logo for our company (Azimuth Adventure Photography) and haven't been able to come up with anything we like. I put this one together yesterday, so it's a first draft, and we're looking for thoughts from more people out there who can give us some creative insight too!
What I have is this:
The intent with this will be to use it in our branding all over our website, our photos, letterhead, shirts, and all the usual stuff. Is it TOO simple? Does it need color? Gradients? Shadows? NSEW lettering? A round border?
We were shooting for simplicity, and I feel we have it here. It also includes a little of our name with the compass - Azimuth - and ties that in with Adventure in a steep mountain peak. It doesn't include photography because we didn't have any ideas that managed all three plus simplicity. It also leaves things open down the road as we expand into further branches of media such as video.
For video, we're envisioning a short intro clip of a very up close climber sillhouette working his way higher, and then a quick zooming out into the logo itself and our name. We're getting into video a bit more lately, so that versatility will be good.
As a watermark it sort of blends in to dark photos, but stands out nicely in color or lighter ones, as seen here. Also, I haven't figured out how to really integrate the text into it, and could use some ideas on that too.
Any help will be greatly appreciated! It's good to finally have an idea to take someplace, we're just a bit at a loss for where to go with this or if we even need to take it any further at all. Thanks for looking!
www.morffed.com
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The thing is, there are companies that specialise in designing logos and branding, they have very clever people working for them that do nothing but logos. The best logos are the ones you look at and think, 'now why didn't I think of that', and that's the point, you didn't think of it because your not one of these people.
I hope I don't sound too negative, its just that graphic design is something that everyone thinks they can do but unfortunately most can't (do it well).
Sorry
Chris
Become a fan of Chris Humphreys Photography
That said, your graphic does nothing for me at all.
First impression is it remids me of one of those things the police or James Bond would put on the road to blow out the bad guy tyres.
It also says nothing to me that would relate to or remind me of photography.
Remember whatever you come up with, it has to be put on everything... Cards, pics, letter heads, advertisements, polo shirts, caps etc.
It also has to be highly recogniseable. I think your current graphic is hard to recognise and will easily get lost on photos and text etc.
Also remember to create a mega huge file of the logo so you can put it on big stuff like signage without it falling apart.
Many people start off with something that looks good on screen but then dosen't have the resoloution to be upscaled and looks like crap when you try. Do it huge to start and then downsize from there.
I don't think you need something Kitch like a camera outline or a lens or whatever but to me this graphic is awkward, uneasy and just dosen't stand out enough.
To me it looks like nothing I've seen before and I can't even begin to figure out what it means, but I'm sure I'll recognize it if I see it again. I think having people recognize it again is more important than anything else.
Your logo means about as much to me as the Nike logo did when I first saw it. It didn't even give you a hint that it is about shoes, but it acquired it's meaning by having Nike plaster it on everything they did.
Likewise Kodak is a completely meaningless and madeup name, that acquired it's meaning by being plastered on everything Kodak did. It's hard to think of a more recognizable logo if you want to call it that, when film was king, than that Yellow that Kodak put on all their film boxes and just about everything else. It had no meaning and not even a shape, just that swash of Yellow and you knew it was Kodak.
I think the badge logo for Cadillac cars is overly complicated and a bit garish, and looks like it was designed by a commitee, but I recognize it the instant I see it.
It's good to have a back story for a logo even if it isn't true. If someone asks you can tell it to them and it will just help cement that logo in their mind. Borland software did that with their "Frank Borland" in their advertising. You could put the "story" behind your logo in the About area of your web site. "P and I were up late one night after drinking too much coffee and we saw a flash of light outside the tent so we..." sort of thing.
It's sort of like "You can say whatever you want about me, just spell my name right."
But do you like it? You will have to plaster it on everything and once it's out there changing it is very hard.
http://www.danalphotos.com
http://www.pluralsight.com
http://twitter.com/d114
The Nike logo may not look like much, but I'll bet my house that Nike had a team of top graphics bods working on it for several months. It may not have meant anything to start, but it has a timeless simplicity that has allowed it to fit in with all of their branding and products up to now, and probably for all eternity. They just change the colour, size and placing to suit it's use.
To me that's the key of a good logo, it can be scaled to any size and still look good, it can change colour and still look good and it can fit in with any letterhead, card, photo or product it is placed on. But most imortantly, you have to like it in a year, five years or even 50 years from now.
....and that is why they are so damned difficult to get right.
Become a fan of Chris Humphreys Photography
Company names and logos are among the hardest, and brain frustrating tasks out there.
Just keep at it.
Sam
When I hear "Azimuth" I think of a compass, maps, direction.
Chris, no offense taken, I agree with you entirely and this is why we've had a photography business running for two years now without a logo. We have never been able to make anything remotely good, and believe me we've tried. Now we're getting to the point where we NEED one, but we still don't have that great of a budget, so we're trying to do this ourselves, but we certainly recognize that we're not good at it. That's why I'm reaching out.
By the way, who is a good choice for logo and branding designs? I've looked at a couple options, but I certainly don't know where I ought to go first.
I've had a lot of good input from here and TPPF where I've posted this, so thanks to everyone who has replied! For my next bit of reworking I'm thinking of remaking the mountain entirely to try to make it a little less sharp and mean looking and more like a sleek logo, and maybe trying it with and without the compass rose. We'll see how it goes! Thanks again!
www.morffed.com
What Chris said. It looks unbalanced. It is not abstract enough to fall under the Nike paradigm. It looks like you just laid something on top of a compass rose and hoped for the best.
Not the most original concept, but sometimes seeing some ideas will spark something in your own mind, even if you hate them. Hope it gets the creative juices flowing.
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He hee, sorry Richy. Didn't know I had 'it' in the first place!:D
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I think your current choice if fine. If I went on an adventure with you and you gave me a coffee cup with that logo on it, I'm sure some of my friends was ask "What the heck is the crazy thing on your coffee cup?" What more could you ask for from a logo?
I don't think an small shop should go to designer. Maybe use a graphic artist to clean things up. The cost is nowhere near the benefit for a small shop. I know I'm a lonely voice in the wind here...
But I've gone with both the designer and the industrial designer thing in the past for projects in the past... I've been in charge of both software and hardware development departments.
Money isn't the issue, in the end you have decide if what they did with works in your market. And I'll guarentee they will have nowhere the understanding your market that you do.
Outside designers don't always come up with something that works. What they do come up with though is a bill to charge you for another try. If you go through the "try, write check, try again, change designer" loop enough times you will end up with something that is graphically stunning and might even work in your market. But will it give you more market share than the logo you put together yourself? If you really think so spend the bucks.
I guess I'm cynical. One of the other things I've ended up doing a lot is showing computer newbe's how to use software. All those incredibly well drawn icons... new users are clueless as to what they mean. Once you show them "push this button to do that" the will remember the image, but no matter how clever that image was done it has no meaning.
There was an eletric utility in the area that had a really "clever" logo. I happed to know a number of people in the utility and asked them what the logo was. They had no idea, some of them called it a rubber duck but they weren't sure why the company had chosen it. It turns out it was a sine wave, filled in, viewed from an off-angle perspective so it didn't quite look like a sine wave. People in the area did associate the logo with the company but of course had no idea what it ment.
A company I did some work for realized there web site wasn't clicking with there customers. The ended up spending $1M+ for a professional redesign. The results were worse in terms of customer response.
Wasn't it NBC or some other US TV network that recently spent something like $10M to redo their logo but ended up throwing it all away in the end?
You know your market. Make a couple of more stabs at a design. Go to some people in your market... don't listen to what they say, look at how they react.
The contrarian is leaving soapbox for now, thanks for listening.
http://www.danalphotos.com
http://www.pluralsight.com
http://twitter.com/d114
Does anyone know a good place to go for such things? And will an established company offer me anything better than the logo contest websites out there like worth1000.com and 99designs.com? At the moment I'm kind of leaning toward that avenue, since the results I'm seeing are pretty good as far as I can tell, and the price can be pretty reasonable. I haven't yet priced a design company though, so I'm looking to do that and see how they compare.
www.morffed.com
Ragon Photography.com
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We got some good input over at TPPF, so we worked with that and got a couple different results. Kelsey worked up this one here:
Here's my take on the mountain/path idea. For starters I made mine curvy as opposed to Kelsey's more edgy design. Then I moved into coloring for it, and started out with a natural scene:
I'm not a big fan of that, so I tweaked it more to a brown:
And leaning toward a northern theme, an icy blue one. I like this one, but then we may have some trouble integrating it into a website layout that we like, since we won't be going pastel blue for the whole thing. Or I might be totally wrong there.
Now our current website (www.azimuthadventure.com) is darker grays, not because we chose them specifically, but because it was a simple smugmug theme and we personally lean toward dark to show off the photos. We're not attached to the dark colorlessness, and we especially want to set a color scheme for our branding that we'll stick with. Here's the icy one reflected in black, and then white:
So does this work? And comparing my curves to the edges of Kelsey's above? And if something like this is at least halfway tolerable, is the direction I'm going with the colors going to work? I haven't quite decided what sort of coloring we'll want to go with yet. Once I get that I'll move into some text...
Thanks again for all the help everyone!
www.morffed.com
This one almost looks like a real logo. Keep down that path.
I think this one is great!!!
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