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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).
Recently, I read through an article on a popular design website that talked about the quality to price ratio, and how that relates to web design. In a nut shell, the author takes the stance that the quality of design and the monetary cost of producing or procuring that design has no relationship.
This article got me thinking about how this relates with what we do at Elexicon, and more specifically the projects that I’ve worked on as a designer here. I agree with the article to a point that “good” design is subjective, that it’s ‘in the eye of the beholder’ as some may say, and that it’s really about getting the most for your money. That being said though, I think it’s important to understand the difference between a subjective design, and a website strategy that is current to today’s web standards.
Thinking about this made me proud to be where I am, and working with the people that I do, which correlates with another point that is made in the article. It states that being confident in your product or service is infectious. It brings credibility to our work that you as a client (be it new or potential) know that you have a strong brand like Elexicon behind the design and development that you receive.
All this relates back, I think, with what the author was talking about pertaining to price point and good design. I feel like we’ve found a good balance between both these things here. This I think is a reason our clients choose to do business with us. It’s no secret that there are an abundance of designers and developers out there, but I feel it’s a company that has a team with this type of balance that makes the difference.
Being able to walk away at the end of the day knowing that we’re producing great looking, industry leading, web savvy designs that are not only unique in their build and design, but reflect the character of the client is reason enough I think to hold our heads high.
Elexicon is an interactive design and development agency based in Grand Rapids, Michigan...More>
