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As a web designer and information architect it’s my job to make things simple. So simplicity, of course, is one of the attributes our firm strives for in all our work, as well. Our content specialists work on web copy to make it easier to read and understand. Our web marketing expertise focuses on boiling content down to its essence, for both its audience and for search engines. Our designers take complex technical product information such as flow charts and schematics and create visualizations and diagrams that tell a clear story. Or they create an icon or a logo that needs to communicate the most critical information about a product or brand in a half-inch square space.
Lately, for no reason I can tell, I’ve been seeing quotations about simplicity in books and on web sites. I continued browsing and searching to find a few more. I’m struck by the fact that the giant, iconic minds of art, science and philosophy all revere simplicity as a core principle. da Vinci, Thoreau, Einstein, and many others. So I thought I’d make a blog post out of them … they’re all very useful and all remarkably similar in their sentiment.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” - Leonardo da Vinci
“Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.” - Frank Lloyd Wright
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.” - Henry David Thoreau
“Simplicity is the glory of expression” - Walt Whitman
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” - Albert Einstein
“Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” - Albert Einstein
“A vocabulary of truth and simplicity will be of service throughout your life” — Winston Churchill
“In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” - Fredric Chopin
If you use Brands of the World (BotW) often, you might have noticed that they have a new logo … but the real question is, does this prized time-saving tool for designers worldwide have your new logo? BotW now has Elexicon’s mark on board, and they should have yours too. Here’s why.
Having recently supplied BotW with our logo (Side note: BotW would be better named “Logos of the World” since the site is mainly a high-resolution logo repository — logos aren’t brands but rather ingredients of brands.) I can identify with the unease experienced in the upload process. With perhaps too much old school marketer in me, I felt a little uncomfortable tossing our infinitely scalable and yes, infinitely editable vector logo into a giant, heavily used bucket of brands (albeit a nice, well designed bucket with a navigable UI and search function). BotW has over 2 million unique visitors and over 30 million page views per month; and when you understand the importance of taking steps to protect your visual identity or that of a client’s, being cavalier about this is not an option.
So contemplating the decision to upload your vector logo to BotW can look a little like the self-retorting banter of Wallace Shawn as the Sicilian villain, Vizzini in the iocane poisoning scene of The Princess Bride … It seems that no matter what decision you make; or how long you take to make it, you’re going to keel over afterward. If you upload your logo you’ll have the angst of imagining someone misusing your mark in an infinite number of high-resolution ways ranging from comic mischief to fraud. However if you don’t upload your mark, other companies realizing significant benefits from public relations and marketing expediencies, external links to their site and global exposure will leave you behind.
BotW has their own list of usage benefits, but for me what tips the scales to the upload decision (or drinking the upload goblet?) is that I’ve been THAT designer. Plenty of times, I’ve had to scramble for a variety of logos to complete creative work on mission-critical (but somehow forgotten about until the last minute?) group promotions in print ads or large format applications. Sometimes there’s enough time to track down quality logos for each company through the proper channels. Other times there isn’t enough time. This results in a loss for both the company and the designer who either has to live with sacrificed quality or take enough headache medicine to painstakingly refurbish a poor quality version.
It might be a utopian dream, but a single repository for the most up-to-date and high quality vector logos of all the companies in the world (hooah!) would likely save many organizations and designers from ghastly reproductions of web-snagged GIFs and JPGs – or from having to omit the company from the piece. As of today, BotW is as close as it gets to that utopia. As to protecting your visual identity, the question becomes: How are you protecting your identity if a designer working on a legitimate but time-crunched project snags a small 72 dpi logo from your website and enlarges it by 500 jaggy percentage points for a trade show poster? (I – ahem — heard of – uh — some other designer doing that before). And of course, you can also post your logo usage guidelines.
Furthermore, downloading a logo from BotW is contingent upon agreeing to their terms of use and penalties including disallowing use of the logo without the owner’s permission. At the end of the day, if someone is bent on using your logo without permission, they’ll probably do so without the assistance of BotW and if a designer is trying to use it correctly, BotW can help. So while all companies are unique and should review their own policies regarding the provision of high-resolution logo files, I think the benefits of utilizing Brands of the World generally outweigh the risks.
Happy uploading … and like Vizzini wisely said, “Never tangle with a jaggy logo when your brand is on the line!” (I might have modified that a bit).
OK, designers. Next time you ponder that great visual identity, forget the “visual mark looks good on a fax machine, too” requirement. If Flogos, an Alabama-based special effects company gets their way we’ll all be putting our logo comps through the “looks great chopped out of helium soap bubbles and floating through the sky” test.
They claim to be ready to custom “float” your logo in size increments (diameter?) of 24, 36, and 48 inches. They already have contracts in place with Disney and Universal Studios and pro sports teams are raising eyebrows. In addition to assumed stress relieving benefits of this device to a skeet-shooting logo critic such as myself, the inventors also say they can vary the height of these “cloud advertisements” and the soap/helium mixtures are safe for the environment and airplanes.
There does, however seem to be a number of Flogos skeptics out there with cynical chatter appearing on LiveScience and Brand New over the conquest of pristine “blue sky” space for the purposes of marketing. While I see their point, daytime sky marketing isn’t a new medium (and we don’t even need to discuss “night time signage” using roaming search lights, fireworks, and other darkness shattering media). Airplane banners, sky writing, tethered helium markers and hot air balloons have been around for decades — and arguably do their work in a more visually obtrusive fashion than a few dainty bubbles. Colorado based GoFast, a sports energy drink has even sought to conquest the skys by sponsoring a jet pack team (didn’t know there was such a thing, but it looks like they’re having a “pilot search” if you feel like getting in line as a guinea pig ala flambe’. Boss, consider this my formal request for time off — yee haw!).
So whether you’re a Flogos cynic or a Flogos seeker watching for the first appearance of this thing in your neighborhood (I predict a used car lot), you have to admit there’s something captivating about a free floating logo drifting skyward, with only the wind to guide it. Just try and tell me you’ve never stood there in that crowd — stiff necked and squinting up at that tiny disappearing spec that used to be some kid’s helium balloon while everyone takes turns whispering, “I can still see it!” and “Where’d it go?”. So with that type of captivation, maybe this company has stumbled upon the advertising specialties industry’s lightning in a bottle — or in a bubble? But let’s not even bother asking if there’s a money back guarantee for those unexpected wind gusts.
One requirement of a good web site is the ability to change the look and feel without much difficulty. There are at least two broad strategies for accomplishing this. One strategy is to use templates to generate the HTML for a page. Changing the template(s) changes the site.
Within the last few years, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has become a popular method to create radically different looks for the same HTML. The CSS Zen Garden is the poster site for this technique. By submitting a new CSS file and associated graphics, web designers can radically change the presentation of identical HTML.
It is no small task to create clean HTML which is properly prepped for this technique. Web browser compatibility complicates the process further.
Tasks like this require the development of a framework to simplify the decision making process and avoid the need to reinvent the wheel for every site. I believe the use of microformats is one way to tackle the underlying HTML structure.
Google has also come up with an interesting approach called BlueprintCSS, which deserves some consideration. They have addressed some of the common layout and flexible design issues by creating screen and print CSS stylesheets which act on a standardized naming convention for HTML classes. They have also included a “Plug-in” architecture which really make their solution interesting.
The result is a feature set which includes: “an easily customizable grid, sensible typography, relative font-sizes everywhere, a typographic baseline, an extendable plugin system, perfected CSS reset, a stylesheet for printing, compressed version, no bloat of any kind”
This seems like a good starting point and at the very least it can serve as guide when creating a custom framework for your own site.
This is a fascinating illusion that was new to me. Amazingly, the squares labeled A and B are both the same shade of gray. Click the image to learn more.
Here are some other related fun links:
What can I say about this? Sketching your own furniture into reality seems cool, but I’m looking forward to a day when I can rapid prototype my own full-scale house.
This post makes me a bit of a Mac-basher, but Apple’s Mac vs. PC ads are so smug I have to do it.
Apparently, the way the new MacBook is designed, the sharp plastic of case cuts into the user’s wrists as they type. Now, I thought Macs were user-friendly?
There have been 3 suggested solutions that I know. One, get out the sand paper and get to work. Two, uglify your Apple-art with wrist pads. Three,–my personal favorite–wear wrist bands. I see a Mac-inspired fashion trend here.
Well, if you don’t like your options, you can always run OSX on a Dell (or other Intel-based laptop).
I was so excited to read about the upcoming full-length independent film, Helvetica, that I almost forgot to be depressed at what a geek that makes me.
Today, by chance, I stumbled across a whole realm of computer graphics that I had never even considered… pixel art. Originating before the days of Photoshop and other vector-based programs, this genre of art is created, well, one pixel at a time. Sounds ridiculous, right? See if you still think so after checking out the following images, which are some of my favorites from the eBoy website:
I am amazed by the complexity of these works. They are bright and fun, and it seems as though there is always something new to discover about them. And I can’t even begin to guess at the number of hours that were put into each image. Incredible.
Much of eBoy’s images are done in the classic 3D style, which is a near-isometric projection. This just means that lines don’t converge as they approach the horizon, they stay parallel. Thus, the sides of blocks, walls, and buildings all have a “two pixels over, one pixel up” slope. Not all pixel art follows this formula, however, and can be equally (if not much more) impressive. The following images are from DeviantArt, where you can view hundreds of pixel art entries.
For a final example, I’d like to provide a link to Drububu’s portfolio. He uses pixel art fused with some really nice Flash work to create some very interesting applications and animations. It’s definitely worth a look.
The first pixel art was created as early as the 1970’s, but I would be remiss not to mention the history of art using simple blocks of color. For thousands of years, artists have created intricate mosaics and beadworks with their bare hands. A far cry from a mouse and a computer screen, these art forms are arguably more difficult and tedious than pixel art, and clearly set the precident for the digital manifestation seen today. Regardless, the time and effort put into all these forms of artwork is astounding, and these artists should be applauded for their patience and dedication to their craft.
Wendy MacNaughton recalls her design adventure in a national civic sensitization campaign for the first democratic local elections in Rwanda in late 2000. Sure, mixing your own spray mount from flower and water is tough — a MacGyverism to be admired. But what must it be like to be handed the task of conceptualizing a visual vernacular in a developing nation that has endured unimaginable hardship — as well as ethnic and political tension? This requires a return to an axiom of all good visual communication: “In order to create effective, relevant work, visual communicators need to learn to work cooperatively with members of the communities they are communicating to.”
Wendy’s closing remarks leave some ambiguity as to whether or not her efforts performed as intended. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating case study of an important, gutsy project.
And, let’s just ignore that little blurb about the Mac being “useless”.
Elexicon is an interactive design and development agency based in Grand Rapids, Michigan...More>
