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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

Rather than dying the death that pro-spec advocates predicted, the debate about spec work, so-called “design crowdsourcing” and design contest sites seems to be heating up across the internet, as more and more designers become aware of the issue, with many seeing it as a threat to the graphic design profession itself. On the pro-spec side, there are a few more design contest companies rolling out their websites, presumably as more people figure getting a whole load of designers to work for free and selling the work to their clients is an awesome business plan. With summer vacation schedules, working on our new logo , retooling our website and focusing our brand , I’ve sorta been out of the loop for a month or so and thought a trip around the webs might be just what the doctor ordered.

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A really, really SPECtacular series of links…

If you’ve been following our blog over the past few months, you’ll know that we’re planning a logo makeover and new brand roll out for The Logo Factory . In fact, we chronicled the development of our new logo starting here , continuing here , and then finishing up with the ‘final chapter’ here . Long and short of it – we’ve decided to lose the famous TLF house (even though it’s been with us for a while ) and use a simple font-driven design and a cog element.

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And now, onto the website design

Have you ever wondered why every business establishment spends millions of dollars in sponsoring one or the other sport or game? You probably not!  Every major or minor company, whether it be a manufacturer of a consumer product or a service provider, inevitably supports a sports team or club, a mere local, state level, national level or international level team or club, depending on its financial stand! According to www.livemint.com, sports sponsorship is on the most buoyant areas of marketing in recent years.  The autos (motor car manufacturers) and financial services (banks, insurance companies, etc.) are the two of the biggest sectors of financial support for sport, spending millions of dollars on the sports events they sponsor

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Role of Sports Logo Design

Whenever, we get stuck with our logo design projects, we all know exactly which galleries to check for inspiration. Every logo designer knows by heart, which sites to surf to jump start his creativity when reached a dead end. And, certainly we find food for inspiration…don’t we?Well, today I decided, instead of listing the names of these top galleries, (so you don’t experience Déjà vu) I should compile amazingly creative logos submitted on these sites

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Collection of Remarkable Logos from Top Logo Design Galleries

A few weeks ago, I told you about plans to rework The Logo Factory logo and walked readers through the stupidly exhaustive process of redesigning a logo. After overhauling The Logo Factory house ( long overdue ) I set about incorporating the icon into a servicable word mark. I thought we were on the right path, but numerous nay-nays in the comments section gave me reason to pause

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Reworking The Logo Factory design (cont’d)

The argument about speculative work and design contest sites continues unabated as designers and creative types grapple with the most contentious subject in the graphic design industry today. If the ongoing forum and blog arguments weren’t enough, the debate has now moved into the Twitterverse (that’s Twitter talk for people who, ahm, Twitter ).

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Battle for hearts and minds continues

Back in October, we tinkered around with redesigning The Logo Factory logo (see Battle of The Logos for more). We were originally thinking about a complete overhaul: a new factory ‘house’, typography, color scheme – the works. Trouble is, and as much as I’d like to change The Logo Factory ‘house’, it’s not really practical

Link:
Dispatches from the design trenches – reworking The Factory logo

Over the last few months we have been asked to produce stationery for many types of small business, predominantly for the following reasons: * We can produce short runs … no need to order quantities of 2,500 or similar! (We for instance, only produce 100 of anything for Stylish Group because I get fed up of the design!!) * There is NO charge to lay out simple text headings, etc – that is included in the price we give you (if you want a logo designing etc, that is where £35 per hour kicks in) * Everything is fully proofed for you * We can be as creative as you want and we only charge £35 per hour for our design service – try finding someone cheaper than that! * Our service can be as extensive as you like, i.e. business stationery, corporate invitations, Christmas cards … you name it! Click here for more information

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New Stylish service for small business ..

Taking time this morning to do some blog house cleaning – catching up on unfinished business and unpublished material. First up, a full transcript of the SXSW 09 Is Spec Work Evil

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SXSW “Is Spec Work Evil?” panel transcript

Logo Category: Security Logos Logo Type: Iconic Logos Client Location: Chicago, IL 60641 Project Type: PLATINUM Brand Package Project Cost: $997 Project Summary: Citywide Security Group provides contract security guard service as well as private investigations. Located in Chicago, Illinois, CityWide Group ensures their clients get high quality and reliable security service

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Citywide Security Group Logo Brand Identity