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The Oscar nominations were released this morning and I thought it might be fun to not only list the contenders, but also take a look at the logos of the top ten best pictures, ranking them from one to ten (according to my humble opinion, natch). Granted, some of the movies don’t technically feature ‘logos’ (while a few are quite strong) and the overall idea a bit of a stretch, but this IS a logo design blog, and if I don’t crowbar Oscar nominations into a blog post el pronto , someone else will.

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Oscar best picture nominations and their logos

Logorama , a stunning film by French collective H5 (filmmakers Francois Alaux , Herve de Crecy and Ludovic Houplain ), is a violent, profane, action-packed caper set in a world comprised entirely of well-known corporate logos and mascots.

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Logorama. Short film featuring corporate brands as villains and heroes gets Oscar nod.

I’ve read a lot about Dubai that paints a sad picture , but Philip Bloom makes it easy to look beyond the dark side and witness the undoubted beauty of the man-made surroundings. This four-minute timelapse video was filmed in Dubai over five days and five nights, shot using a Canon 7D and a Panasonic GF1 . It’s definitely best viewed full-screen.

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Five days in Dubai

Wiki defines Schadendreude as a German word that translates into “pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others” and often involves some form of chronic, comical irony. If there was a case of logo design schadendreude, this might be the poster-child, as French-based file sharing enthusiasts are taking great glee in pointing out. To wit: As a result of a controversial ruling late last year, the French government tabled a series of copyright centric HADOPI laws, the lofty goals of which are “promoting the distribution and protection of creative works on the internet”

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Logo design Schadenfreude: Anti-piracy organization logo infringes on copyright

Gonna bring a little high-brow stuff to the proceedings this morning and take a look at this remarkable animation of an equally remarkable work of art. Picasso’s Guernica is one of my favorite paintings (a reproduction hangs in my living room) so I found this 3D ‘exploration’ particularly stunning and as an example of computer animation, brilliantly executed. Created as part of a Master in 3D computer Animation thesis at the University of Georgia by animator Lena Gieseke several years ago, the short movie adds an entire new dimension (three actually) to the masterpiece.

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Picasso’s Guernica in 3D

My position, and that of many in the design community, is that spec work and design contests amount to nothing more than unpaid labor. Designer after designer pitching logos, website designs, brochures and what have you, all in the hopes of getting paid. Something.

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Children designers on design contest & crowdsourcing sites?

Here’s a brief look inside one of my latest graphic design reads: Studio Culture: The secret life of the graphic design studio . Edited by Tony Brook and Adrian Shaughnessy, here’s the blurb: Studio Culture provides a unique glimpse into the inner workings of 28 leading graphic design studios. In a series of penetrating interviews, the secret life of the studio is revealed, and the mechanics of building and maintaining a vibrant studio culture are laid bare with disarming frankness.

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Studio Culture

While many articles try to dissect the process of designing a logo itself, I will attempt to share tips from my experiences with branding-focused logo design for the real world. Photo by lpwines With the surge of “stock” logos, the quality of branding for new companies is literally going downhill. Many new designers fail to see that a logo, unlike any other design element, is literally the face of a company, and hence attached to a much larger beast

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5 Branding Basics Every Logo Designer Should Know

Criticize spec work, design contests or crowdsourcing sites, and you run the risk of being called a snooty designer , a gatekeeper, a parnoid bedwetter, a high-maintenance whiny art baby. Or worse. Being opposed to designers (mostly younger ones, often from developing nations) working without pay means you are a dinosaur, unwilling, or unable, to adapt to the ‘new reality’ of the graphic design industry

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Numbers – The ever-shifting realities of crowdsourcing and design contest sites.

When I first learned about David Airey ’s then in-progress book Logo Design Love. (named after his excellent design blog of the same name) I’ll admit to feeling a slight twinge of envy. Dammit, I’ve been trying to write a book on logo design for years, but finding it rather exasperating, it remains firmly entrenched in my ‘things to get around to whenever I have the time or inclination’.

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Logo Design Love. A totally impartial book review.

The following passage is excerpted from Marty Neumeier’s latest book, The Designful Company: How to build a culture of nonstop innovation . Imagine a crazy world where what you learned in business school is either upside down or backwards—where customers control the company, jobs are avenues of self-expression, the barriers to competition are out of your control, strangers design your products, fewer features are better, advertising drives customers away, demographics are beside the point, whatever you sell you take back, best practices are obsolete at birth; where meaning talks, money walks, and stability is fantasy; where talent trumps obedience, imagination beats knowledge, and empathy trounces logic. If you’ve been paying close enough attention, you don’t have to imagine this Alice-in-Wonderland scenario

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The Designful Company

Tim Sohn , a wonderful SF photographer, just sent us these incredible photos and these very kind words about the business cards and stationery we just designed and printed for him. “’Wow! This is nice!’ That’s the reaction I get every time I hand out one of these beautiful letterpress business cards designed by Zida Borcich over at Studio Z Mendocino

Originally posted here:
Bay Area Wedding Photographer – Letterpress Business Cards

If you’ve been following the design and advertising industry news over the past month or so, you’ve probably bumped into someone sqwaking about the CP+B (Crispin, Porter & Bogusky) crowdsourced project for the Brammo company, creator of the Enteria electric ‘power bike’. If not, let’s recap quickly.

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Defending crowdsourcing & design contests. The platitudes of spec work.

Client Name: SageWerx Logo Category: Graphic Design Logos Logo Type: Iconic Logos Client Location: Waldorf, MD 20601 ( Maryland Logo Design ) Project Type: Gold Logo Package Project Cost: $497 Project Summary: The client owned a small technology consulting firm that provides enterprise technology consulting services to large system integrators. He wanted his image to be corporate yet eye catching

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Sage Werx IT Consulting Logo Design

Disclaimer Acoustiguide creates interactive museum guides for museums, art galleries, heritage sites and other public displays. Starting with it’s first recorded guide in 1957, a tour of Hyde Park narrated by Eleanor Roosevelt, Acoustiguide’s current products are solid state and include keypads to allow visitors to choose content appropriate to their current location in the exhibit as well as additional material as well as multimedia and video units. The Acoustiguide logo design is a line art based logo depicting a human face formed by brush strokes seemly written by a child.

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Acoustiguide Museum Guide Logo Design

Disclaimer The ABC (American Broadcasting Company) company logo is quite a simple iconic logo design . The ABC logo, being a media logo , still retains it’s simple font treatment enclosed by a circle back from 1979. ABC went through various phases of logo design starting in 1943 right up to the 3D ABC HD logo that it sports on it’s website now.

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ABC Logo Design | American Broadcasting Company Logo

Little bit of a dustup going up Kelowna way in British Columbia, thanks to the city’s newly unveiled logo. The design, part of an $80,000 rebranding project, was warmly received by city council members until it was suggested that the supposedly pine-cone inspired logo looked awfully similar to a logo designed a few years back for a US real estate company called Sunhaven , by another US company called Lend Design .

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Kelowna logo design dust-up

Image copyright: nerovivo Here follows a guest post by Aditya Mahesh of AMBeat.com , a blog offering resources for entrepreneurs — advice, start-up profiles, interviews, news analysis, and more . Now I’ve never been a graphic designer (my background’s in copywriting), but by hiring designers on numerous occasions I’ve gained insights from the customer-side that will help you satisfy your own clients. The following tips will help you keep your customers coming back

Excerpt from:
Hiring a designer: a client’s perspective

One of the cooler features on being on Twitter ( follow us here ) is that you’ll bump into like-minded people that you otherwise might not have had the opportunity. Such was the case with my running into Jeremy Tuber ( follow him here ), an Arizona-based graphic designer who runs the very-appropriately named website , Being a Starving Artist Sucks (indeed it does)

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Practical how-to business advice for the freelance designer

If you’ll indulge a personal post for a few minutes, I’d like to take a few moments to send my lovely wife Sue , a simple, but heartfelt, “Thank You” on our anniversary. Sue and I have been married for four years today (the picture above is from our post-wedding reception at the house and yes, that’s our infamous pond in the background). Four years may not seem like a lot of time, but we lived together for over ten years before that, only deciding to make things “official” in August of 2006

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To my lovely wife – thank you