Design Shard

10 Things That Will Make Your Logo Look More Productive

Forbes reveals in one of its articles that logos are the most important branding elements for a business. Logos don’t just create an identity for the company but also reflect its ideals, vision and culture to audience at large. Therefore, it’s important for any business, especially startups and small businesses, to invest in a logo design that’s unique, memorable and productive.

But we’re sure, you wouldn’t disagree that designing such logos isn’t an easy task. Obviously! There is much more to just having your name and a cool image/symbol in your logo.

Remember, first impression is the last impression! And quite often, logos make for a company’s first impression, one that influences their brand perception and reflects how serious and committed the company is. While there are many logos that have attained a cult status amongst masses, there are some that have not been able to make a mark at all.

So, if you too are at the helm of a startup and are looking to create a logo that adds value to your brand and become memorable so that even a toddler can recognize it from a distance, simply skim through these 10 easy to follow tips.

1. Make It Work Vertically and Horizontally

Web Designer Depot says that a logo should be simple enough to be easily recognized by anyone and everyone. It should be memorable. The orientation or the angle of the logo doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that it should feature something unique, something catchy and something that’s attention-grabbing right from the outset, without being drawn or sketched out in a complicated way. Remember, a complex or fussy logo does nothing except for confusing your target audience about your brand, your business, and your values.

2. No Need of a Box

No, we don’t mean that you shouldn’t use boxes at all. But it pays to create a logo design that’s able to stand on its own, with or without a box. Though a box adds value to the overall voice of your logo design, it’s essential to ensure that its absence doesn’t diminish your logo’s charm in any way.

3. Limit your Logo to Single Font

Having too many fonts can confuse and distract your target customers and project your brand as an inconsistent one. Smashing Magazine suggests you to try and use only one font (or two if you also have a tagline completing your logo). This will make your logo look more appealing. In fact, it’s the safest idea to effectively communicate your brand message and reflect the seriousness of your business. Do you know that a human attention span is even less than a gold fish? So, you get only eight seconds to becharm onlookers with your logo design. And that’s why it isn’t a good idea to mix too many fonts for it may clutter your logo elements and distract the onlookers.

4. Make it Represent Your Business

Let’s start this point with an example: If you’re into educational business, you would obviously want an innovative and creative logo design that exude trustworthiness and sophistication. However, if you are into sports and fitness domain, it will need to represent endurance and strength. A logo represents your business image and personality in the market. Therefore, you must do well to ensure that your logo is designed in a way that it helps in clearly reflecting the nature of your business. The usage of fonts, colors, designs should all be appropriate and is accordance with your brand’s personality. Remember, your logo is an impression of what your company is all about!

5. Connect it With Your Brand—and Nothing Else

In simple words, the logo should be all about your brand and nothing else. The elements you use in your logo should be well-researched and at the same original and creative in equal measures. One should follow logo design trends. Steer clear of designers who plagiarize elements from historical symbols and other popular graphical elements. This results in creating a negative impact about your company before your target audiences.

6. Make Sure it’s Timeless

By being timeless, we mean that your logo must be capable enough to endure the test of time. Remember, the passage of time should not alter the quality of the logo. It must look trendy, no matter what year it is. Do well to cleverly craft a logo that remains unchanged and unharmed for years and decades. A timeless logo will show that you’re consistent with your quality and efficiency. Be advised that customers easily connect with logos that are consistent for a considerably longer period of time.

7. Maintain Versatility

Your logo design should be such that it looks good on anything, from posters to coffee mugs and from websites to printed materials. It should go unscathed when printed on billboards or on a stamp. Do well to ensure that it doesn’t follow a particular color scheme or pattern. It should look good on any background, be it black or white. For example, Apple’s logo looks good irrespective of the color scheme or the material it’s printed on.

8. It Should Appeal to All Age Groups

You cannot really succeed if anything you design is not flexible with people of all age groups. Remember, the spectrum of users that you are catering to is diverse and all of them have different tastes and preferences. Therefore, your logo must be designed in a way that it attracts everyone, from younger ones to the matured ones. Don’t be rigid in your designs. Leave room for flexibility.

9. Don’t be Predictable

Yes, you don’t have to confuse your customers by making complex designs (as discussed above) but at the same time you should try to make your logo worth-watching. Your logo should not be too loud, but must evoke curiosity so that people look at it for longer time. Some of the world’s biggest brands opt for logos with hidden meanings to add that element of surprise for their visitors. For instance, FedEx logo features a hidden arrow in its wordmark symbol to represent its faster delivery and efficient services.

10. Be Simple

Last but not the least, just keep it simple! Nobody is going to judge your typography skills by looking at your logo. So, relax! You don’t even have to have the name of your brand or caption in your design. Look at Nike! People remember its swossh symbol, no matter where they find it yet its considered as one of the well designed and popular sports logo. Remember, usually people don’t relate to the logos that are overtly complicated. Your logo isn’t the manifesto of your business. So, it’s important to keep it simple.

We’re sure that these easy to follow points will definitely help you understand how you can make your logo look more productive. So, brace yourself and design some stunning logos that will set you apart from the crowd of insipid and tasteless symbols and icons.

As always, please share your thoughts in the comments, if you enjoyed this post share it on twitter, and never hesitate to hit us up with any questions, critiques, or feedback. Don’t forget to sign up for ‘Design Instruct Weekly Newsletter’ to get more such interesting content delivered right to your inbox.

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Keep All Your Ideas On File

The great thing about inspiration is that you can never know when it could strike. For this reason, you need to make hay while the sun shines. To a large extent, this relies on basic preparation. You should always keep a text document or spreadsheet handy at a place you can easily access any time that you like. Any time you get an interesting idea that would be great as a post on your blog, write it down in this file.

When you have a routine of doing this each and every time, you will soon have a large inventory that you can work from, even if you do not feel particularly creative.

Get Ideas from Other Bloggers

One way to quickly and consistently develop ideas for your blog posts is to gain constant exposure to the type of blogs that you aspire to. You could use a feed reader like Feedly and subscribe to various blogs. Check in to these blogs at least once a day and view what they publish.

Do not be afraid to steal some of the best ideas that have worked on other blogs. There is a lot that you can learn from those who have succeeded before you. If you read an inspiring post from one of your competitors, note it down in your ideas file. It may just prove to be the bit of inspiration that sparks a new idea in you.

Ask the audience

A foolish blogger will go out in search of inspiration, while efficient bloggers will let ideas come to them. It is easy to crowdsource ideas for your posts by studying the comments on your blog, checking the replies you get on Twitter and keenly listening when people talk about your subject matter.

When you understand the questions that people are asking, and know what gets people excited or confused and know their stories, you have gone a long way toward developing great post ideas. Talk to you readers and find out the things they would like to know more about and then give them this information. Although it sounds extremely simple, there are few people who actually take the time to do it.

Ask Others

When you are stuck for inspiration, it is important to remember that there are many other bloggers who have been there before but have managed to conquer this hurdle and have documented the process they went through. A great way to overcome writers’ block is to have a look at some of the excellent post ideas that your peers in the blogosphere have come up with.

When you ask and find out what great posts you have written in the past that still bring in loads of traffic in the weeks, months and even years after they were first published, you will know the kind of content that works.

You should then think of how to expand on this content. Is it possible to dissect one of these posts and provide its ideas in more detailed steps? Could you write a follow-up post? Is it possible to refresh the post by including newer ideas? Your readers and other bloggers can help you find the answers to these questions and more.

Ride On Trending Topics

Today, there are many ways to discover hot topics. An excellent way to come up with content that many people will want to read and share is finding out beforehand what it is that people are looking for in their searches. Some of these are:

Google Trends
com/search
com

All the above sources will give you an idea of the type of content that is most popular at the moment.

Tell the Story So Far

There are times when the best posts are those that tell your entire story of your blog in a single, condensed version. No matter what you blog about, it is likely that you have been doing it for a while. What you need to tell your readers is:

What have you managed to learn during this time?
What is it that has changed during that time?
If you could give yourself a piece of advice when you started out, what would this advice be?

Writing this kind of post is more than an exercise in narcissism; the posts could end up being incredibly useful to others in your niche. Everybody starts somewhere, and you could help someone else learn from the mistakes you made early in your career.

Give Something Back Through a Guide

Many bloggers ask: What kind of blog post is the best? The answer to this is surprisingly simple. The best blog post is one that makes people click through and read more of your posts. Surprisingly, few bloggers link the posts on their blog together adequately to capitalise on this fact.

You should take time to re-read your old posts, group posts that are related together and order them in a sort of mini-guide to enable visitors to your blog to read them in sequence, in a meaningful way. Always include an introduction, add a conclusion as well as some brief descriptions and links to the relevant posts. This will ensure that you have a guide that will lead visitors on a quest around your blog.

Conclusion

Every blogger gets great ideas for their posts every day. What proves difficult is organising these ideas in an actionable way. Hopefully, the ideas in this post will offer you useful guidelines that you can follow while allowing your creative juices to flow.

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Whimsical, Surreal Illustrations with iStock’s Signature Artist – Iveta Vaicule

Illustrations are at the forefront of communications these days, with everyone from small businesses to major brands using them to make a visual connection.

Illustrations used to act as supporting elements to big beautiful photos on websites and campaigns, but now advertisers and designers are using illustrations more and more as the main vehicle for expressing their message

iStock by Getty Images Senior Manager of Illustration Jennifer Borton said. They can really provide a unique and personal stamp on any project.

Iveta Vaicule, one of Jennifer’s favorite illustrators, is creating her own mark on the illustration world. Born in Latvia and now living in Norwich, UK, she originally started her career as a graphic designer before realizing her true passion lied in illustration.

Illustration provides me with more freedom than graphic design, it feels more like ‘me,’” Iveta said. “I love the creativity and how you can put together a bunch of scribbles and something beautiful comes out of it.

Iveta’s signature hand-drawn style combined with the whimsical, childlike quality of her designs helps her stand out among other illustrators.

“Iveta’s style is very surreal and almost primitive — it’s deliberately clunky and very charming. Her color palettes are really bizarre and cool. She’ll take two colors that you would never think would work together and she crashes them together and it works beautifully,” Jennifer said. “I also love the texture she builds up. The more you look at her illustrations, the more you get drawn into the composition and start noticing all the little details she’s added.”

One of Iveta’s favorite topics to draw are cityscapes. Her illustrations provide a quirky, fun perspective of destinations across the globe from Moscow to Rio. Interestingly, she hasn’t actually been to most of the cities she’s drawn, and instead uses photographs as inspiration to create her own unique spin.

“She takes the buildings and landmarks and mashes them all together into these crazy compositions with a skewed viewpoint,” Jennifer said. “They’re really interesting and stand out among a sea of more straightforward, realistic depictions of these locations. It’s almost like she just draws whatever she wants.

And that’s exactly what she does.

It gives me great joy, excitement and happiness to create something. It’s a good way to express myself — it’s almost like a diary of my life. Looking at various illustrations of mine brings back memories of places, people, pets, happy and sad times from my past, I’m really just trying to draw for myself, that’s how I produce the best work. If you do something for yourself and other people like it, that’s a massive bonus.

This photo was inspired by a man I once dated a long time ago who was very good at playing piano and writing little songs. He was a very entertaining and interesting person but he didn’t pursue his dream of becoming a musician and instead, he sold pianos and caravans. He also couldn’t click his fingers. So in this illustration he is in a band, singing away and clicking his fingers too.

iStock are offering a free download of Iveta’s chosen image

[button url=”http://istockphoto.7eer.net/c/261011/258824/4205?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.istockphoto.com%2Fvector%2Fman-singing-snapping-and-planing-piano-in-the-band-gm464993388-59423702%3Fst%3Dd525181″ postid=”” style=”btn-primary” size=”btn-default” target=”_blank” fullwidth=”false”]Download Now[/button]

View Iveta’s collection and millions more royalty-free images at iStock.com

Creating a Home Office that Invigorates Creativity

When you have been toiling away at work for hours on end, it’s easy to lose your creative drive and become bogged down in the minutia of your day-to-day operational demands. For anyone working in graphic design, this creativity block can be a serious detriment to your business’s prosperity. That’s why we at Modernize have found it to be essential to have a home office that recharges your creative batteries, all while promoting productivity and organization, too.

Increased Productivity

Usually a person’s home is where they find solace, and it is when your mind is the most at peace that your creative juices will flow freely. A study conducted by Stanford University noted that in-office employees were 13 percent less productive than their home-based counterparts due in large part to noisier working environments and far more illnesses. By working from home, you are in charge of every aspect of the space from music selection to temperature, giving you an office where you will be the most comfortable. Plus, when you work from home you are able to optimize each minute of your work day by not wasting time in sitting in traffic twice a day!

Inspirational Nooks

Sometimes you have to see past the computer screen to know exactly what to design in the digital world. By having a home office that surrounds you in inspiration rather than a dull cubicle, all you need to do in order to break through a mental block is to look around your office to find that creative boost. Whether it’s pictures of your family on vacation, an item of geeky fandom, or a painting of enlightening quote, these elements will help put your task into perspective and refocus your attention on solving the task at hand.

Clutter is Killer and Aesthetic is Key

When you are designing your home office, though, show some restraint on not overcrowding your space with these motivational items. Scientists at the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute have found that when your environment is cluttered, it makes it significantly more challenging for you to be able to concentrate. Since you have the freedom to design your space as you see fit, opt for a streamlined office aesthetic that makes you feel invigorated and refreshed, being sure to include plenty of organizational solutions.

Improved Finances

If you are one of the many graphic designers who have chosen to run their own business or be an independent contractor, then it is especially beneficial to choose a home office versus a traditional office environment. Creativity is virtually impossible when you are stressed about being able to pay your bills. A home office will not only lower your overhead, but it can put money back in your pocket when you take advantage of any tax deductions available for an at-home business.

By taking the time to think about what inspires you and your career goals, you can create a home office that invigorates your creativity and optimizes your productivity.

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Leading E-commerce Website Design Trends of 2016

The ultimate goal of e-commerce websites is to get the conversion. Even leading e-commerce sites work for the same goal. And for the accomplishment of the goal, it is essential to include the leading e-commerce website designs that are in the trend now.

We have chosen some of the most trending e-commerce website designs for this year that are going to remain alive for longer. Thus, in the case, you are anywhere near to plan an e-commerce website, here are the leading elements that must be taken care of while designing the same.

Above the Fold Web Design

Emerged as an essential newspaper design, above the fold design got extremely popular for e-commerce websites also. The element is added to offer the most important content of the web above the fold. With this designing element in action, the visitors are presented with the most important web element just after they open a website.

The dimension of the fold varies for responsive & non-responsive layout. The most common dimensions are from 1024*786 pixels to 1280*1024, after reducing the browser navigation bar, scroll bar, window element, etc.

Flat Design

The giant search engine Google along with Microsoft and Apple are also in support of flat design. There is nothing new about flat design but have suddenly become one of the most important web design trends now. Flat design is in trend not only because it is eye-pleasing but also because it is easier to understand.

For developers, the good news is that it is easy to develop and make responsive as well. More to this, the extraordinary elements of the flat design help users to concentrate on the web content.

Tiled Navigation

Tiled navigation is extremely popular among e-commerce sites as it offers a captivating experience to the users. E-commerce websites offer a preview of the products in the form of tiles using images. These product images are not only high in resolution but also much more appealing if compared with the text for the similar product.

Thus, titled navigation is all that website owners can get benefited from. No website can bear the loss wherein visitors come to their website and leave the same without completing the desired action. Tiled navigation can thus be used to grab the attention of the visitors, hold them for longer and appeal them to accomplish the desired purchasing action.

Large and Flexible Typography

Making use of large, flexible typography for the content adds more to this element. Content, on the other hand, should be centered to make it more engaging.

Large and flexible typography plays an important role in creating a robust brand identity, which additionally attracts potential visitors over the website. Adding this element easily guarantees the popularity of the website among the visitors.

Hamburger Menu

Hamburger menu helps website owners cut a lot of clutter on an e-commerce website and hide them behind these menus. These menus are used as an important element of mobiles only but today their usages have extended to desktop websites also.

Hamburger menu is a wise choice for developers to save the considerable screen space. Besides this, improved user experience is an add-on when combining the effects of hamburger menu in any e-commerce website.

Good CTA Button

Call to action buttons are used for a variety of reasons. However, the main aim lies in getting visitors on the website and making them accomplish certain actions. These certain actions can let them to add a product to their cart, getting related information, downloading something or any other such stuff.

A good CTA is thus a chance provided to the user to accomplish any of the above-written examples. For the website owners, on the other hand, it is an opportunity to guide the users towards getting an easy conversion.

Hero Images

Vision is the strongest human sense and thus, the large and beautiful hero images are very much popular as the leading trend in the e-commerce website designing. Hero images have evolved to be a compelling element to grab users’ attention towards a website. Hero images above the scroll followed by a card based arrangement are slowly gaining the attention.

Most of the hero images are photographs that have some kind of relation with the content posted on the website. Such images drive the users towards the site. The soothing and pleasing colors of these images add more to the overall appearance of the website.

Rich Motion Animation

Rich motion animation contributes to websites’ enhanced storytelling. This makes the browsing experience more interactive and entertaining for the visitors. Different websites make use of different animation techniques, and one of them is motion animation.

Human eyes are naturally drawn to motion, which makes motion animation a perfect element for an e-commerce website. Motion also enhances the visual hierarchy, thus making the websites more appealing for the visitors. This makes the picture more interesting over the websites.

Responsiveness

Responsiveness has become one of the leading trends for the e-commerce websites just after the Google changed the algorithm for not ranking the non-mobile friendly websites in the search result feed. The algorithm has come at a time when mobile e-commerce (only in the US) has a 30% market share, which is much more in other countries of the world.

As responsiveness makes it easy to access a website on any of the devices, it is very much important for website owners to invest in this element to extend the reach of their websites. Including the responsive technique is not all, do ensure to check the same through responsive design testing tool.

Large Photography and Videos

“A picture is worth a thousand words” finds excellent relevance with large photography and videos as one of the most important elements for website designing. In the web arena today, large picture and images rule the sites. In order to enhance the effect of these images, web designers and developers optimize the elements within the images to boost their impact over the visitors.

At one place where such designs hold the visitors for longer, they are also excellent to deliver the messages instead of writing any content, on the other. Thus, embrace the large photography and videos this year.

Conclusion

While these trends keep on appearing and getting replaced by the newer ones, here is the sum up of the most important web design element trend for the year 2016