Now we produce Swish websites on a regular basis. Our customers seem to be pretty satisfied with their websites and we save our time, since it would take more time to do similar things in Flash. And you know, time is money, so it’s up to you, of course, to choose.

Here I present a choice selection of logo design resources that I believe are beneficial to serious designers (with a touch of humour here and there).

Where to find excellent logo typefaces

• Hoefler & Frere-Jones
  H&FJ works with brand leaders in every sector, developing original typefaces and licensing fonts from its library of nearly 1,000 designs.
• Porchez Typofonderie
  An independent digital type foundry in France, designing, manufacturing and selling high quality typefaces for adventurous digital typographers.
• OurType
  Founded in 2002, OurType is managed by three partners: Fred Smeijers, Corina Cotorobai and Rudy Geeraerts.
• Village
  The union of eleven young type foundries who have decided to go it alone, together.
• P22
  Creates computer typefaces inspired by Art, History, and sometimes Science.
• FontShop
  Around for 16 years, since the dawn of digital type.

The history of logo design

• History of popular logo designs
  Categorised in alphabetical order with a search feature too.
• The Evolution of Tech Company Logos
  How famous logo designs came to be, from Neatorama
• The Evolution of Car Logos
  More historical insights from Neatorama
• Branding Firefox
  A short insight into the history of the Firefox internet browser brand

Logo design trends

• Logo design trends in 2008
  Subjective, as with a lot of logo design, and whilst I do keep an eye on trends I always design logos that work as flat art. That way, the logo is still effective once the trend has passed.
• 2007 trends
  Bill Gardner, of LogoLounge, takes us on a journey through the trends of 2000

A selection of logo design articles

• 100 unused logos and what they reveal about my design inclinations
  An excellent insight behind the designer by Armin of Speak Up.
• 6 reasons why a logo should cost more than your lunch
  Tara of Graphic Design Blog writes a short but sweet article.
• Logo Notions
  Jeff Fisher’s insightful collection of logo design articles on Creative Latitude.
• Logos with a meaning
  An extra insight into a selection of logos, by Ivan of CreativeBits.
• How many speech bubble logos have you seen lately?
  A fraction of what’s going down out there in Web Bubble Logo Land.
• 5 vital logo design tips
  A guest article on davidairey.com by graphic designer, Jacob Cass.
• Logo design guide
  youthedesigner.com offers some stellar advice for designing logos.
• The LogoWorks saga
  A huge collection of articles about the multi-million dollar business, LogoWorks.
• Is your logo design phallic?
  A little logo humour to lighten the mood

Some heavyweight agencies in the design industry

• Pentagram
• Johnson Banks
• Tayburn
• The Partners
• ico design
• Minale Tattersfield
• FutureBrand
• Chermayeff & Geismar

Logo design awards

• Eulda 2007 winners // 2006 winners
  The winning entries from the European Logo Design Awards (EULDA) from 2007 and 2006.
• Wolda
  This is what used to be Eulda, but has since expanded into the World Logo Design Awards (Wolda).
• Identity: Best of 2007 winners // 2006 winners
  The results of an international logo design competition, judged by a very experienced panel.
• Logo Design Love Awards
  Deadline 1st March 2008. Entry is free and the entrants will be featured right here on Logo Design Love.

Blogs about logo design

• Brand New
  Excellent discussion focusing solely on corporate and brand identity work.
• Logo design category on David Airey.com
  An added insight into logo design from yours truly.
• logolog
  A logo log from 38one.
• bLog-oMotives
  Jeff Fisher’s logo design blog.
• Speak Up on Identity
  The branding and identity category on Speak Up.

Urbanfonts is a web 2.0 Ajax style font directory, containing an amazing collection of over 8,000 free fonts and dingbats in PC and Mac format along with a huge commercial fonts archive. Not all the fonts are of the highest quality, you just have to digg through to find something of a higher quality but with over 8,000 free fonts you should find something that will suite your projects.

The site offers various ways to get a live preview of the fonts, either by clicking on a font which lets you preview the font in many different ways (sample text, character set, different sizes, etc) or by dynamic mouseovers to let you see the full character set without refreshing the page which can be real time savers.

The site is cleanly laid out and easy to navigate, it also has a blog with the latest font news and some interesting histories of various fonts such as Helvetica.

For those who don’t want to customize this freeibe, the Virb8 Bros. included 20 seperate transparent PNG files. These you can use directly and put them on your blog or elsewhere with no hassle.

You can download this free vector pack right here.

1. It has to attract visitors’ attention. For this purpose, there is nothing better than use flash technology. Flash effects and animation are proved to be the best and modern ways to make your website eye-catching.

2. Your website has to differ from your competitors and ensure its recognition. It means it should give your visitors an idea of what type of products you have, compared to others in this niche. In this connection, it’s better to hire a professional photographer and think out how to show off your products in the most effective way.

Besides, the inner pages should look similar. At first, it allows visitors effortlessly find any necessary information. Secondly, pages which look alike and have similar structure, are taken as familiar. It’s a known fact that most people prefer familiar to something new and unknown.

3. And at last, effective web design should bring information in full capacity. Effective design underlines your importance. Successful color combination, tastefully picked fonts, frames and free spaces, as a rule, impress visitors.

An ideal showcase, which combines all the principles mentioned above, is a furniture company flash template I have recently came across. Provided by IceTemplates, it proves that there is no need to order custom web design, because a website template can satisfy your needs either.

Furniture company Flash CMS template by IceTemplates

Its Live Demo is here.

Some people are born creative. They slop over with insightful bubbles and always come up with a brand new and ground-breaking idea. But what makes a creative person a good designer?
What matters is your ability to produce. Creativity alone is highly valuable, agreed, but what if you can’t turn it into someting of true value?

Take a look at the advertising industry. The classic creative team consists of a Creative Director (CD) with at least one Art Director (AD) and Copywriter (CW). Now - how exactly did the CD get his job?

In general, he ascended from one of the latter positions. He can only do his job if he knows how to get off the pot - in other words, he has to know how to channel his creativity. That’s why this is rule number one: Without skills, creativity means nothing. But let’s move on to the 2nd secret rule of design:

2. Ideas are everything. (With the proper inspiration)

When a new task arrives, we can’t always rely on our natural ability to come up with a great idea. Sure, we may have a bunch of ideas whirring around in our head, and we start putting them down - but what if we find out that they don’t turn out the way we expected? And what if we have a blockade and no ideas at all?

In these cases, we have to undertake steps in order to come up with an idea. Naturally, an idea can’t be forced. How often did you sit and wait for it to come, but nothing happened?

What we can do is vitalize our minds by opening the door to inspiration. We can do this in various different ways, at the desk as well as outside. Sometimes, taking a walk helps free your mind, or getting together with friends. There are various techniques to get inspired, and you may already know one or two of them.

3. Your computer is your most important tool - right AFTER your brain and a blank sheet of paper

Your brain does all the work, not Mac or Adobe. It’s always better to have a plan before getting started. It’s like “normal” life.

4. Valuable resources are a grave necessity

Do you know how much time you’ve spent searching for a photograph or image to use in your designs, in total? If you’re not lucky enough to have a photographer you can work with, or if your client’s budget doesn’t allow custom photography, you’ll need a great deal of valuable photos, illustrations, and even video at your disposal.
Stock sites do a great job here. There are lots out there, however only a few ones you can consider truly valuable. Prices are from free to over 500 $ for an image. While free sites usually don’t have the quality, and you should consider setting up a shooting before paying 500 dollars for a photograph, there are some excellent sites around where you can get high-quality images for 1$ each, royalty-free.

For that, there’s no way around iStockphoto.com. They claim to be the world’s busiest image market. Other good sites are Dreamstime.com, 123rf.com and StockXpert.com - check these out as well.

5. Everything you do has been done already

Do you know Ads of the World? It’s a teriffic website posting creative advertising daily. The community has the chance to comment on every ad. If you take a look around, you’ll quickly discover at least one community member commenting with a single word: DONE.

That can be quite amusing. Considering the fact that the majority of ideas in advertising has already been done in one way or another, I tend to *cough* smile at these fellas who are spooking around in the forums and enlighten us with their “done” on every single page. Who can say what’s an original idea? There’s a thin line between inspiration and plagiarism, I agree; but sometimes, a splendid idea for brand A is based on a great idea for product B which has been adapted from a wonderful idea for service C. It depends on the adaption. Opening Vogue or GQ and seeing the exact same ad for 10 different fashion brands on the first 10 pages - done, done, done! Building on a great idea and creating something new, wonderfully creative and beautiful for another brand: well done.

What do you think about this?