Logo Design Process Case Study – How to Create a Logo

A few weeks back I wrote about having a logo designed through LogoNerds, and how happy I was with their service. Compared to other design services out there, they are much cheaper, faster and professional than what I have experienced elsewhere. With that said, I went back to them again to have a few more logos created for my sites.

I thought it would be a fun idea to break down the logo creation process of my latest design. I’m working on a new pet food coupons and review web site that I needed a dog and cat related logo for. I filled out their design information form with a bunch of ideas, and here are the first set of logos I received from LogoNerds.

After you’ve filled out your initial design information for LogoNerds, you will have to wait a couple of days for their first set of concepts. I always go with their $47 “Professional Business Logo” package since it comes with 6 different draft designs (and print ready images). The most exciting part of the logo design process is when you get those first drafts and have an idea where your logo is headed.

Depending on the web site or job, sometimes I will just select one of their first drafts and go with that logo. This time around I knew I wanted something really great for the site, so I worked with LogoNerds to create the perfect logo. After looking at all of the logos for a couple days, and asking friends and family which logo they liked best, and why, I decided to go with CONCEPT 1 (top left). I thought it was simple enough to get the point across, but also fun and brandable at the same time.

I told LogoNerds that I would like to see if they could play around with the bone structure in the background and if they could create a new variation of the dog and cat faces. You can see their revision update below.

The new bone looked much better, and I liked the new cat and dog face even more. From there I gave the LogoNerds team a few ideas on how what colors to add into the logo. Their color update is shown below.

The logo is looking pretty good now, and could be considered finished, but I still wasn’t loving the “PetFoodia.com” text beneath the logo. I then requested the team try and create something nice that would go along with the logo.

The next set of finished logos with a new font design can be seen below.

While some of the font designs looks nice, none of them blew me away. I like the concept on the bottom left logo, but it just didn’t look right. Once again, I went back to the LogoNerds team to request another text revision set, this time with “more simple” text concepts. Within a couple days I had another set, which you can see below.

I was much happier with this set of designs. They were much less advanced and colorful as the previous set, but I wanted something simple and to the point. I decided on the bottom left logo with, and to remove the tagline from the logo.

After the thorough design and revision process, I was extremely happy with the end result. You can see the final logo below.

LogoNerds would complete the order and send over a final design zip with a variation of different sizes, colors and file types.

After looking over the whole process, and how many times I asked LogoNerds for a revision, it’s quite amazing the service they can offer for only $47.

I’ve already purchased four different logos from LogoNerds over the past couple of months, it’s just way to cost effective and easy to end up with a quality logo. I’ve used other services and design contest sites in the past, but most of them will cost you in the $99 to $199 range, and may drag on for weeks. Through a partnership with BloggingTips and LogoNerds, we are able to offer you an extra $10 off on the $47 “Professional Logo Package”, which brings the total to only $37. Use coupon code B10OFF to save $10 off your $47 purchase, that’s over 20% off!

- Order your custom logo from LogoNerds

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Principles of Effective Blog Design

This is a guest post by Peep Laja, CEO of Traindom.

People judge books by the cover, and other people by their looks.

Take a look at these two men:

Now answer these questions (you can’t choose “neither”):

Which one would you rather ask investment advice from?Which one would you rather have babysit your children?Which one would you rather have cook your dinner?

… and so on. You don’t know anything about these men. Yet you make assumptions and can even take decisions based on their looks.

What does that have to do with your blog? Everything!

“As aesthetically orientated humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. Our offline behaviour and inclinations translate to our online existence.”—Dr. Brent Coker

Dr. Brent Coker studied the impact of attractive websites on human behavior. Websites that are more attractive and include more trimmings create a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in consumers.

If somebody knows you well, they don’t care about your looks that much. If they see you for the first time, looks matter a lot.

The content of your blog is always more important than the design, but you need to woo people with your design first. You draw them in with design, and keep with content.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”—Steve Jobs

The following advice will help you design a better blog and this in turn will help you sell more (whether you’re selling free sign-ups, coaching sessions, products, or whatever).

Who is your site for? What are they looking for? Value function over aesthetics: 76% of people want it to be easy for them to find what they want.

What kind of blog layouts are they used to using? Remember, people spend most of their time on other websites, not yours. Avoid totally new and never-seen-before layouts. Your car isn’t unique, and your house might not be either.

For return visitors, search is vital. Make sure your search box is clearly visible (above the fold), at least 27 characters wide and that the search can actually find relevant stuff. WordPress’s built-in search is very poor, and it lists the results by date, not relevance. Use a plugin like Relevanssi to improve it tremendously.

Use plenty of white space. Don’t fill every possible space with banners, messages, or whatever else. The more breathing room there is, the easier it is for visitors to consume the information you produce.

Here’s an excellent post on using white space.

You should never publish a blog post without an image. A visual communicates your ideas much faster than any text can.

The best images follow the rule of thirds: an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.

Image licensed under Creative Commons

See how the image on the right is more interesting? That’s rule of thirds in action.

Content and clarity are important parts of the design.

What is this place? What can I do here? How is it useful? First-time visitors need to get answers to these questions within their first seconds on your blog.

Make sure it’s possible to clearly understand what your blog is about and who’s it for—no matter which page the visitors land on. The better you build a connection between your reader and your blog, the higher the chances they will stick around.

People start reading your website from the top-left corner. The fixations go in order from left to right. That’s where you want to place the most important information.

The text on your blog should be beautiful and easy to read.

Use large fonts (at least 14px), short lines (see the width of Tynan’s blog posts), and lots of white space. Create a new paragraph every three or four lines, and a subheading after every two to three paragraphs.

The best blog typography lends a meaningful purpose to the content while triggering emotions in your readers in the process. Besides picking a beautiful web font, make sure that different text elements have a different look and feel (main headings, subheadings, regular text, italic text, quotes, lists, and so on).

Here are 10 Examples of Beautiful CSS Typography and how they did it. Also take a look at Space, a WordPress theme designed for reading.

You can use TypeTester to test and compare different fonts, sizes and so on.

Over 95% of people won’t buy anything on their first visit. Hence you should not even try to sell to your first-time visitors. Instead, try to get them to come back so you can build a relationship and add value before you make them an offer of any kind.

How can you do that?

Invite them to subscribe to your RSS feed (and state how many people already do as a type of social proof).Use a lead magnet to attract them to sign up to your email list.Invite them to subscribe to your blog posts over email (Feedburner is a good tool for this).Ask them to follow you on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

Make sure you focus on one of these options most (email list is best), but give a choice of up to three options.

This is how aext.net is doing it:

The aext.net follow invitation

The best signup forms:

put the form labels above the input box (not next to it)give clear reasons to take actionhave the submit button say what’s coming nextask for as little user data as possible—an email address is enough in most cases.

The more fields people have to fill in to subscribe, the less likely they’ll be to do it. Email personalization by name is not working as well anymore anyway, so you might as well not ask for those details.

The One Question, a site helping people find their life purpose, has 30% of new visitors sign up via this form every day:

The One Question subscription form

Why is it so effective? The form offers the exact thing people search for on Google to come to the site. If you offer people what they want, they are happy to sign up.

You don’t need to hire a fancy designer and pay top dollar for your logo. Even huge budgets might not make much difference here.

You can create a beautiful logo using text. Pick a beautiful fontand a background color you like—and voil?! A designer from Edicy took just 15 minutes to create this logo for an imaginary company (Tajo Oja):

Edicy's text-only logo example, by Tajo.ee

Stock photos seem like a good idea, but 90% of them are utterly fake and cheesy. Have you googled “women laughing alone with salad” recently?

How can you expect to be taken seriously if you feature suits shaking hands and half-naked women measuring each others waists?

Some people advocate that given the proliferation of low-cost cameras and smart phones, your own photography should be used rather than stock.  I agree.

Let’s say you like the color red, but can’t decide what other colors match your favorite shade of red.

You don’t have to guess or ask your friends. You can use online color matching tools for this:

That’s actually not the right question to ask. You should only change it if there’s a real need behind it. What’s not working for you today? Put the goal first, and the redesign second.

Will the new design help you get more clicks to your ads? Increase pageviews or signups?

Ideally you’ll see your blog as a living, breathing organism that never stops evolving. Constantly A/B test your most important pages and design elements, and measure the improvement. You can only improve what you measure.

Peep Laja is the CEO of Traindom, online software for building online courses and membership sites.

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Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? The Bestselling Text is Completely Updated and Better than Ever!

Praise for the Third Edition:

??œI have used the older edition with great success. The new one is even better.??
-Kathleen Duncan, University of La Verne

The Third Edition of the bestselling text Research Design by John W. Creswell enables readers to compare three approaches to research-qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods-in a single research methods text. The book presents these three approaches side by side within the context of the process of research from the beginning steps of philosophical assumptions to the writing and presenting of research. Written in a user-friendly manner, Creswell's text? does not rely on technical jargon. He cuts to the core of what a reader needs to know to read and design research in part by showcasing ideas in a scaffold approach so that the reader understands ideas from the simple to the complex.

Key updates to the Third Edition

• Presents the preliminary steps of using philosophical assumptions in the beginning of the book
• Provides an expanded discussion on ethical issues
• Emphasizes new Web-based technologies for literature searches
• Offers updated information about mixed methods research procedures
• Contains a glossary of terms
• Highlights ??œresearch tips?? throughout the chapters incorporating the author???s experiences over the last 35 years

The Instructor???s Resource? site at http://www.sagepub.com/creswell3einstr/? contains:? 

• Sample Syllabi
• PowerPoint Slide Sets
• Sample Student Proposals
• Suggested Studies Published in Journal Articles
• Application Activities and Tutorial
• Peer-Feedback Group Activities
• Study Design Group Activities
• End-of-Chapter Checklists

The Student Study Site at? www.sagepub.com/creswellstudy? offers:

• Sample Student Proposals
• Application Activities and Tutorials
• Peer-Feedback Group Activities
• Study Design Group Activities
• End-of-Chapter Checklists

Research Design, Third Edition appeals to students taking research design and research methods classes throughout the social and behavioral sciences-from undergraduates to the most advanced doctoral programs.

Price: $69.95

Click here to buy from Amazon