Logo critique wanted

[philjohns]

thanks toon...that one was designed while doing coursework so its back to the drawing board!

[LaurenMarie]

Another thing to consider when designing logos is how well it will shrink down to smaller sizes. Those dots will not reproduce at half an inch. We talked about what goes into designing logos in another post recently (at least I did!). Here's basically what I said there:

When looking at creating logos, I do word associations, look at different ways the initials can interact with each other, think about the concepts that make the business unique and definitely do tons of sketches on paper before ever going into the computer. They don't have to be stellar drawings, just scribble down your ideas. Usually once you get the obvious answer out, that's when the real creative ideas come through. Research is important, too. Try LogoSauce or LogoPond and of course, there is always Google Image Search! Find what you like about various logos and see if those concepts or techniques will work for your design.

Look at articles that talk about what is a good logo design, like What Makes a Good Logo? so that you'll know some general guidelines to logo design. David Airey is a great resource for all things logo, by the way.

Above all, it just takes practice!

[philjohns]

Funnily enough, before reading this post, Im searching on google, looking at logo suace and have a4 paper in front of me. Im linking the P and J together but cannot find a way to link the I ...:(

[LaurenMarie]

Well, they all have straight strokes, what if the I is lowercase and part of the J or the P (I'd personally pick the J since when lowercase, it shares the dot, but make the J uppercase for this). Make the shared part of the stroke a different color and add a dot to the top.

[philjohns]

u lost me when you started to describe how to join them together ;)

[LaurenMarie]

Sorry, I wish I had access to upload stuff so I could show you a quick sketch (no ftp at work). I'm sure you'll think of something creative though! Share your design when you're finished (maybe in the General Design>Critiques area)!

[philjohns]

Dont worry, your help as been really good anyway! and just for the record - you can attach a file when righting a reply in the "go advanced" section lol

and my bad about the wrong section!

[amymissingham]

Photoshop will limit the final size of the logo for print. The program wokes in pixels, little spots of colour, this can restrict you in a lot of ways.
If you use a vectorial program (ie: Illustrator, Flash, CorelDraw), you have endless freedom in resizing and reorganizing single elements on the screen. You still can create all the same effects as you would on Photoshop and can also work in layers...

[LaurenMarie]

Photoshop vectors are still vectors, it's just that on screen they are rendered in pixels, which can be frustrating for details.

Phil, no worries about the section. People do it all the time! And methods of organization make sense to people in different ways. I'll keep that in mind about the images. I've only seen the Quick Reply Insert Image and I thought I needed to upload it first. Thanks for that!

[amymissingham]

sorry slipped a post in completely the wrong place...
still familiarizing myself with the layout, I didn't turn the page, sorry :P