Five Fundamental Principles of Logo Design

Start with the art-school basics. The finest logos honor five fundamental design principles: They are (1)simple, (2)memorable, (3) appropriate, (4)versatile, and (5)timeless. Of course, the iconic logo designers harmonize the five elements so masterfully that critics cannot deconstruct their work for the sake of demonstrating how each principle manifests in a design. The designers themselves cannot always account for how and why a design “just works.” Among the five elements, “appropriateness” always emerges as most elusive. A Wall Street investment firm cannot risk cute, clever, or “edgy,” because its logo must signal stability, prudence, and wisdom. A high-tech electronics manufacturer cannot risk over-complication, because the association between technology and complication triggers viewers’ acute technophobia.

Experts most often point to the Nike “swoosh” as the archetype of all great logos. Simple enough that teenagers can doodle it on their notebooks, and versatile enough that it works on everything from swimsuits to basketballs, the swoosh became an instant classic—a design for the ages. In addition to exemplifying all the standards in action, the swoosh makes the case for scouting the unknown designers as well as the hall-of-famers, because Nike founder Bill Bowerman found it buried in a Portland State design student’s portfolio.

Who Can conceive and Execute a Fine Logo Design?

As you begin your search for a logo and designer, you must have a crystal clear concept of your corporate identity. Ask and answer, “What do we do?” or “What do we make?” in a simple declarative sentence. Then, begin conjuring an image that represents your simple answer. The rest probably will be a process of trial-and-error until the design “clicks.” Marketers strongly recommend you take a crash course in logo design and artist-client relations at logoblog.com, a clearing house for logo-related information and a great place to scout for starving artists. When you feel confident you can speak fluently in the language-of-logo, choose among any or all of four options…

• Option One: Look for an up-and-comer. The Art Institutes have campuses all around the country, and each campus is home to skilled faculty and a legion of starving students, all of whom willingly will compete for your business. Satisfied customers say they contacted prominent, well-placed faculty and negotiated terms for a contest, a paid internship, or a commissioned project for a distinguished student. The deal naturally helps talented students build their portfolios, and it helps you save money.
• Option Two: High-Powered and high-priced. Two websites showcase the work of the world’s top designers, the people who crafted all the most recognizable and memorable corporate logos. Look at http://www.logodesignlove.com/ and http://www.logosdesigners.com/ and then follow their “resources” links to contact the artists whose work you like best. Be prepared, however, because elite work comes at elite prices.
• Option Three: Find an innovator. The best of the cutting-edge designers show the best from their portfolios at dailydesigninspiration.com. There, you will find a diverse array of ingenious designs that capture companies’ identities so perfectly the critics cannot recreate their magic in words. The images range from cute to clever and all the way to compelling, so that you can develop your sense of where on the continuum you want you logo to land.
• Option Four: The Wal-Mart of logo design. More than 33,000 graphic designers routinely compete at http://www.logodesignguru.com/. In the same way that freelance writing sites invite writers to compete for the privilege of supplying your web content, Logo Design Guru invites designers to compete for the privilege of rendering your corporate identity in pictorial form. You describe what you want and how much you will pay. Then, an average of more than 100 different artists submit samples according to your specs and timeline. The site has received favorable reviews from all the major business publications, all of which have praised its efficiency and economy.

You cannot afford to under-estimate your logo’s power. Coca-Cola owns the world’s most recognizable logo, and it dominates the world’s soft-drink market. Of course, the logo drives sales. Be patient and picky enough that you discover precisely the right logo to drive your company to the top of its industry.

Photo credits: Kelly being a graphic designer by jessica mullen/flickr; Voltage logo design by Fabio Comparelli/flickr; Spime Design Workshop Logo by David Orban/flickr

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Although most tablets’ screen resolution matches that of the desktop, yet a different version is required for tablets? This is mainly to improve the user experience.

We use mouse clicks and keyboards for desktops while with tablets, we use finger sweeps and on-screen keyboards.

To succeed in this ever growing space, you’ll need to serve a touch optimized version of your website.

So what makes tablet optimization different from optimization for desktop users.

• While most tablets support flash, the most popular one – ipad does not. If you want your site’s content to render correctly on an iPad, then you’d better start converting the Flash content to HTML5.
• Use larger fonts and buttons – Tablets may have smaller displays than computer screens, but larger fonts work better as they are more user friendly on mobile devices. In addition make buttons finger-friendly and make them as large as possible. Offer a way for users to toggle between tablet view and normal view.
• The number of videos and animations affect the site speed. Do not overdo it with these. Use videos only if it adds to the user experience as too many videos can make it difficult for users on the go to have a good experience.
• Keep the checkout simple. Ask for as less information as it gets difficult for a user to type from a tablet and they may save the checkout for processing later if there is an overload of required information. As a result the checkout may never happen.
• Where you can give the option to download information instead of just leaving is on the site.
• Avoid paginated pages. Since scrolling down is pretty easy in tablets, you should opt for view all pages as much as possible.

However, if you already have desktop and mobile friendly versions of your site then just make sure that every page has a corresponding tablet friendly version which is served when a user browses using a tablet.

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If you aren’t familiar with programming or design web sites, you should first start simple and learn the basics of website design before getting into a programming language. Once you and understanding of the basics of website design, then you can look at learning the more complex aspects of a web programming language.

Don’t Start With a Web Programming Language

Before looking into learning a web programming language it is important to first understand the basic structure of a web page. The most basic structure involves HTML, which is short for Hypertext Markup Language. From the very first web page, this markup language has been the primary building block of web pages.

HTML has changed over the years, and each new revision of the HTML standard has added new features, and removed older, obsolete features. The newest standard is HTML5, and it is slowly being adopted online and with the newer web browsers.

In the beginning, HTML was responsible for both the structure and look of a web page. Over time a new type of file was created that manage the look of a page. This file is called a CSS (Cascading Stylesheet) file, and contains the definitions for such things as fonts, sizes, borders, and other elements that control the look of a page.

While learning HTML, you should also learn and understand CSS and how the two files work together to create a web page. These are the two basic elements for website design that you should understand before learning any web programming language.

Javascript – Not Really a Web Programming Language

Javascript is an optional language that you can learn. Technically it isn’t a web programming language since it isn’t compiled and runs within the client’s web browser. By learning Javascript you can create dynamic web pages for a visitor without having to send a request back to the web server.

You shouldn’t rely on Javascript, however, for you whole site as many people may disable Javascript within their browser, so relying on Javascript quite a bit on your site could cause your site to break with such visitors.

Which Web Programming Language?

Now back to real question from the beginning of this post. Once you have learned the basics of website design: HTML, CSS, and possibly Javascript, then you can start to look at a web programming language.

Which language you choose to learn is dependent on what you plan to do. If you are into blogging, and plan to use WordPress, for example, then PHP is your best bet as WordPress is built using PHP. Most, if not all, hosts support PHP so you should have no issues with learning this web programming language.

There is a great deal of information online regarding PHP, so if you can’t figure out how to do something, you should be able to find an answer to your problem with a quick search online. There are also PHP frameworks that already include code for many complex examples.

If you have some Windows programming background, or will be using a Windows-based web server, then I suggest you look at coding in a .Net language. I have been able to create both Windows and Web applications using C#. The advance in the .Net framework has made it very easy to create complex applications with minimal code.

Similar to PHP, there is also a lot of information online about .Net, so you should have no trouble finding a solution to any programming problem you may have.

To get started online, I recommend that you first learn and understand HTML and CSS. Once you have an understanding of those two web design elements, you can then move onto learning a web programming language.

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Google introduced rich snippets in 2009 to provide a better way of structuring data on a web page. Once specific markup was added to an HTML page, Google would parse the page and provide an enhanced search result in its search results page. With Schema.org, Google has now come together with Microsoft and Yahoo! to provide a more uniform structured markup language for webmasters.

What is a Structured Markup Language?

Most websites and blogs use a database to manage the content that is displayed on web pages for the site. For blogs, elements such as post titles, author, published date, and comments are easy to identify, and are stored as such in the database.

Once the page is rendered and displayed in the browser, all those elements are simply text on the page. Now, as a human reading the page, we can distinguish between the various elements, such as knowing who the author of the page is, or when it was published. For search engines, it is a bit more complex.

Every website has it’s own look and feel, as well as different labels and headings for various parts of the pages. Because of these differences, search engines may have trouble finding specific elements that describe the structure of the page. To solve this issue, structured markup languages have been created.

As I mentioned, Google started a structured markup language in 2009, and many websites have been following that format since that time. A few weeks ago, it was announced that a more standard markup language was created, so that webmasters can now use one markup language for the three big search engines.

If you have added the rich snippets and other microformats to your existing website, Google has stated that it will still support the previous formats in its search results. Google has also cautioned that you shouldn’t mix the different structured markup languages on a page as it could confuse its parser.

How Will this Effect You?

At the moment the new structured markup language defined on Schema.org won’t affect your site. It was basically created as a standard which will be used by the three search engines, and possibly more going forward.

The markup language basically describes the structure of a page on your site, and allow the search engines to provide an enhanced result of your site in its search results. If you rank well now, then I don’t think that will change by not inserting the new markup language in your HTML pages.

I have inserted some of the structured markup language in the template of my blog, and I am interested to see how the search engines will react to the additional tags. I’m not expecting anything drastic, if at all, but I am curious as to how it will use the new tags.

Since I have added the tags to my template, if I wanted to remove them, I can easily do so by removing the tags from the two files that I added them into in my template.

What do you think of the new structured data markup language proposed by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!? Do you think that you will look at using it on your site?

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Here are some selected best tools to analyze a website, some come with analysis of specific aspect of a website while others work for the entire website.

• Website Grader. Offer of HubSpot gives analysis report in broken sections.
• Trifecta. Offered by SEOmoz helps in analysis of one single page or the entire domain.
• SpiderSimulator. Offered by Summit Media tells about the search engine friendliness of a website. It includes several tags to make the clear picture of analysis.
• Web Page Analyzer. Offered by WebsiteOptimization.com tells about the download time taken by a website to appear at the screens of users. Analysis and recommendations is the best part of this web analysis tool.
• SEO Analysis Tool. Meta tags, anchor text, and keywords are the main areas addressed in this tool for reporting purpose.
• The Escape’s Web Page Analyzer. It gives information about heading structure issues, keyword usage, content, and links. Despite not being detailed, this report doesn’t carry in depth information about website analysis.
• Seed Keywords. This is actually a plain English SEO review. It provides recommendations about a certain page and also the effect different elements will bring to the SEO page.
• Web Page Analyzer. Offered by WebSubmission.com review of the page along with analyzed features. It also gives advice about bringing changes to a Meta tag.
• Spider Test Offered by We Build Pages gives a look of the webs page the same as it will look at some of the other pages.
• Web Page Analyzer. Offered by Webmster Toolkit help in specifying a URL and gives feedback about the way page is optimized.
• Link Appeal. Offered by Web Master Toolkit, this tool helps in determining the worth of a page with which you are going to link up. Page Rank and outbound links are used to generate the final report.
• Full Page Test. Offered by Pingdom Tools, analyses objects, CSS, RSS, and time taken by a website and redirects.
• Search Engine-Analysis.com. This tool gives report just with the help of a URL or a keyword. It tells about the competition.
• Web Page Speed Test. Offered by SelfSEO tells the difference between your pages and pages of other website.
• Similar Page Checker. It provides detection of duplicate content form the search engine’s perspective.
• Dead-Links.com. It gives useful information about pages the links with 404 error pages.
• Firebug. This tool helps in monitoring CSS, HTML, JavaScript in the browser.

Aren’t these tools enough for website analysis? Do you know any more tools, do share!

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