I came across this article and my immediate thought was, “The logo was designed?” I thought it was typed. Add a soft bevel and some colours and hey presto, a logo! But no. They got someone else to design it by typing it into Photoshop, add a soft bevel and some colours and hey presto, a logo! Now, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing, or a bad logo really, but the justification makes me chuckle. How many times as a designer have you been asked to post-justify a piece of work when really you were using your instincts and your eye to produce something that fit the requirements? I’ve lost count.

It was playful and deceptively simple. The design subtle as to look almost non-designed, the reading effortless. The colors evoke memories of child play, but deftly stray from the color wheel strictures so as to hint to the inherent element of serendipity creeping into any search results page and the irreverance and boldness of the “I am feeling lucky” link. The texture and shading of each letter is done in an unobtrusive way resulting in lifting it from the page while giving it both weight and lightness. It is solid but there is also an ethereal quality to it.

Yes. Indeed. Quite. Fortunately for Google, just typing the company name in Catull works just fine too, ethereal quality or no.

As mentioned elsewhere, it appears that Xerox have rebranded, courtesy of Interbrand. There’s a pretty good critique of the new logo over on Brand New which I mostly agree with, apart from one thing. While the pixellated effect was (and is) rather cliché, Landor’s implementation of it was sophisticated and spoke well of what Xeros did, and still does. Sub-pixel anti-aliasing and high resolution screens notwithstanding, we still produce work in a pixellated environment, and it’s only when we print something that those pixels go away, so the big ‘X’ seemed perfectly appropriate for a company making printers, photocopiers and scanners and the like.

Clearly I’m not party to some vital information here, perhaps Xerox are planning to move into the manufacture of cricket, or petanque balls. Nice wordmark though.

No, it’s not a logo, it’s today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. It really looks like a logo though don’t you think? It reminds me of all the swooshes and planetary logos we’ve seen over the years, except this time it’s the real thing. That’s what it looks like.

I came across this today, Taiwan’s recycling logo. Note the effective use of white space - a reminder of the excellent FedEx logo.

Yes, it’s been around a while, but I don’t trawl for university logos very often. I came across the Coventry University logo today, and was immediately drawn to the calligraphic strokes forming the phoenix image - they remind me of the intaglio-printed lines on banknotes. I have quite a thing for banknote designs anyway. Interestingly, it seems the University decided that right-facing is future-looking, although the idea of using the phoenix refers quite specifically to the past (not that I disagree with their decision). The Wikipedia entry on the logo has this:

In the summer of 2006 the symbol was flipped on its vertical axis in order to portray the head of the phoenix looking to the right. The reason behind the decision was the desire to portray the university as looking forward rather than back.

Found via Computerlove, the portfolio site of James Stone, mimeArtist. It’s a nice site, but the thing that got my attention was the great logo, it’s beautifully expressive and simple. Wish I’d thought of it.

Photoshop has a new logo. No, sorry, I mean Photoshop® has a new® logo™. I saw it on the Adobe page this morning and thought it was a bit of a poor spoof, “This is surely the work of an amateur, as Adobe would never make such a cheap-looking logo.” Unfortunately I was wrong. I saw this article on 30gms, and followed the link to where John Nack, head of product development at Adobe has written about it on his blog, and it’s clear from the comments that most people’s reactions were similar to mine.

The question is, does Photoshop need a logo? If so, does it need anything more than a logotype? A brand-mark like that seems overkill to me, and the addition of the fly-speck TMs and Rs buzzing about it and the putrid dribble of tagline underneath only completes the analogy… of something killed, and left to rot under a bush somewhere.

I just came across “The Ladies Tea” on Swissmiss just now. Like her, I smiled at the logo, which is rather lovely, but couldn’t help but notice the awful kerning on the type. Below I’ve got the original on the left, and a version where I simply retyped the name in Arno Pro on the right. My modified version isn’t perfect, but at least the D-I-E combo isn’t quite so munged.

Yes, I know there’s a missing apostrophe, but putting it in doesn’t help the logo one bit.