Thinkcage

For anyone interested, over at Element Fusion we’re looking for a Web Designer to join our creative team.

We’d like to see:

• Clean design style, intuitive user interfaces, innovative concepts
• Excellent Photoshop/HTML/CSS skills
• Technical expertise balanced by creative thinking
• Ability to work on multiple projects and meet frequent deadlines
• Attention to detail
• Unique and creative portfolio

The web designer should be adept in Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) and capable of taking a website from design concept to fully functional HTML. We’re especially interested in standards-based designers with strong XHTML/CSS skills. Experience with Macromedia Flash, ActionScript, JavaScript/EMCA script, or other dynamic scripting (such as ASP or PHP) a plus.

Element Fusion is a great place to work and we get to work with some of the top clients in the region. To apply drop me a line (jason at thinkcage dot com)or send your resume and portfolio URL to jobs@elementfusion.com.

This article isn’t new, but it showed up on Digg today, the discussion of which reminded me of a similar debate on YayHooray! from last week.

What Makes a Great Logo is a nice overview of the qualities and considerations designers must observe each time they create a logo. However, I tend to disagree with one section in particular:

A logo needs to represent the company it serves. This means that the style must be easily identified with the industry/product/service and must give a clear picture of what is being marketed. If a company is selling auto parts, a delicate script font would not capture the essence of the company. A suitable font would be bold and sturdy-looking. A logo sets the tone for the company. This applies to single-serving logos like Dasani or a multipurpose logo like NBC. In the case of Dasani, we are given a clean, smooth, cold-looking logo to represent water and with NBC we are given with a multicolored peacock representing the different divisions of NBC. Originally the logo was created to show enhancements in color broadcasting, also a good representation.

Read the rest of the article…

I think the idea that a logo must visually represent a company and its industry/product(s)/services is a little old fashioned. By that I mean that a realty company logo need not feature the symbol of a house, a plumber’s logo need not have a pipe wrench in it; these over-used symbols probably do more harm by negatively affecting the uniqueness of the logo than the perceived benefits of the cliched representation.

In my opinion it is most important that a logo be memorable and unique. Being attractive and communicating the company’s primary function are secondary and seem to have little bearing on the success of a logo mark. In fact many companies choose non-representative forms in their logos to avoid being pigeon-holded into a certain group or to keep the mark relevant as they expand into other areas, evolving the business. Furthermore, what tends to happen is the logo’s meaning is informed by the company and the intangible qualities it projects.

A classic example is Paul Rand’s design for IBM where the strong horizontal stripes, which because of their presense in the technology giant’s mark, took on the meaning of high-tech and were subsequently adopted by many companies — like the AT&T example in the article, for instance. In fact, Rand actually used the stripes to solve a purely visual problem with the awkward way the three letters I-B-M work when placed together.

I think a common mistake made by amatuer logo designers and uninformed clients alike is the assertion that the logo is single-handedly responsible for establishing and communicating what the company is and does and all of the intangible things we want customers to know about it. Clients worry that “it has to show that I sell houses, but not just houses, and it has to show that I’m friendly, hip but experienced, and traditional, but not old-fashioned, and that I’m female (because that’s important to my customers) and it has to be blue because I hate green.” However, it seems that the reality is a good mark is a vessel for holding these qualities no matter the form and that in the end, the qualities imbued on a logo have more to do with the quality of the company it represents and it’s customers’ perceptions than any representative visual communication.

Michael Bierut’s post on Design Observer, The Obvious, Shunned by So Many, Is Successfully Avoided Once Again yielded this gem in reference to the grandiose aims of the young designer:

I labored over this 8.5 x 11 inch opus all day, never forgetting what I then held as the twin tenets of responsible design practice (one, create something absolutely without precedent; and two, demonstrate to onlookers how clever I am). Given my predilections at that point in my nascent career, this probably involved merging the home-grown rigorous modernism of Lester Beall and Will Burtin with the formal experimentation of Wolfgang Weingart and April Grieman.

It’s a great read, check it out.

Like nearly every other web designer on the planet, I’ve probably typed “verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif” more times than I care to think about. That decending font list is the backbone of web typography today but its become a bit stale. While it is possible to take advantage of some slightly less ubiquitous faces such as Lucida, Geneva, or Arial Black, for the most part we are stuck with Verdana. Don’t get me wrong, Verdana was a godsend when first released back in the Internet Explorer 4 days (heck I even remember when Verdana was a stand-alone download in the Microsoft TrueType core fonts for the Web) and it is still a fine choice for small, readable paragraph text on screen. It falls apart for use in headings, but is still the best choice in non font-smooting environments. Georgia, another face released at the same time is a very readable alternative to Times but simply has too much of an old style to really be used widely.

However, Microsoft has finally announced a new set of web fonts that will at long last add a little variety to the web. According to this article, there will be six new faces shipping with OS and other software products in 2006. The article features scans of the new faces so head on over for a preview.

Being a CSS-oriented seperation of style and form sort of guy, this is a welcome breath of fresh air for web design. But, like any other advancement on the web, the lowest (or at least middle) common denominator rules and it will be years before these fonts are widespread enough to be truly useful. Not to mention whether or not they are avialable on Linux or OS X, etc…

This morning, ,Wired News is abuzz about a homemade ad for the iPod Mini produced by a 36 year old high school teacher with an interest in motion graphics. The story’s author and cited experts are gushing about the this new viral marketing trend:

“It’s a sign that consumers want to have a role in promoting a product they love,” he said. “There’s a real trend toward consumer-generated media. People are creating news, they’re blogging. People will create marketing as well. This guy is a great example.’

While I agree in principle with what they are saying, I am not so sure that this guy’s intent is quite what they are assuming. Working and going to college as a graphic designer I have created and know of the creation of tons of similar pieces. As a designer you do them to hone your skills. Students do them for in-class projects. Professionals create them to pad a portfolio or learn a new skill/technique. They are probably thousands of similar pieces out on the web.

I by no means wish to belittle this guy’s work as it is a well-executed piece. However it might be jumping the gun ever so slightly to suggest that millions of people (bloggers or not) are going to suddenly start home brewing commercials for products that they love. I love my iPod and I tell my friends that, but I am certainly not going to design a magazine ad to convince them.

Now here is a publication with its heart in the right place even though they clearly don’t get it.

Net Gazette, November 2004, has admirably reported on the recent release of Mozilla’s Firefox 1.0 and have even linked to the Top 10 Reasons to Switch article that boasts among other things, Firefox’s fanatical support for web standards and accessibility.

So what is the problem you might ask? Well, they managed to publish this article on a page made of 100% images. Yes, they laid out the text and cut it into tables and images using Adobe ImageReady. That’s right folks, an online article about a browser rooted in standards and accessibility with absolutely no HTML text on the page.