Arc and Angle

I love logos. They’re pretty. I love the constraints that a designer is given to work with and seeing how creative people can be. They look easy, but they actually need to accomplish a lot. They need to be readable. They need to communicate a feeling or an idea. They need to be unique and memorable. I think they’re fabulous little things.

I’ve been working on my own logo for a little while now as one of the first steps in designing a portfolio site. It’s usually a better idea to spend a lot of time on the logo before jumping into actually making a website because the logo needs to work with the rest of the site and can inform other thematic or color-specific choices. It’s one of those pieces that’s worth spending extra time on and making sure it’s right before going too far forward.

The reason I’m thinking about logos this Sunday is because I sat down at my elderly laptop with a cup of coffee and put on some excellent music to check out my feedly page (which for anyone that subscribes to feeds, I HIGHLY recommend. It’s a much more pleasant way of reading your feeds than Google Reader or other similar readers). I came across a Smashing Magazine article titled “Design a Print-Ready Promotional Ad Using Photoshop and Illustrator”. It mentioned BrandsoftheWorld.com as a place that print designers can go to find vector-based (easily editable) logos of tons of major corporations. It eliminates a lot of emails and phone calls trying to track down high-quality logos.

It’s an awesome place to go to just check out some logos and then, if you’re so inclined, you can download them and work with them yourself. Eeeexceeellent.

I particularly enjoyed this recently uploaded logo:

Oh my goodness, what is Facebook thinking!? It’s so disappointing to see the company so blatantly focus on revenue instead of the users. I’m not going to repost every good article I’ve read about its disregard for privacy issues, its terrible user interface, or the highly questionable behaviors of its current CEO because there are plenty of well-documented articles out there. Facebook and Zuckerberg are the talk of the town, at least in the computer world, and its mostly negative.

A few months ago I watched a video online of Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, being interviewed and he mentioned that he strongly believed that in due time, Facebook would eventually succumb to an open-source social networking application.

It seems that we may be seeing the beginning of this. Fueled by a high state of disenchantment with Facebook, a small group of young motivated guys (still in college) are getting a lot of attention and a lot of verbal and financial backing for a decentralized, open-source social network. They’re starting this at the right time. They’ve named it Diaspora and it hasn’t even been programmed yet, but they’re off to a good start having raked in several thousands of dollars in less than two weeks. They have vowed to spend all summer staring at their computer screens hacking this project out. I’m excited for them and hope it spawns some awesome alternative to Facebook.

A few weeks ago I posted a blog about my ideal work environment. I ended it by saying “If I blog it, it will happen.” Well, it happened, so there ya go.

Well, it didn’t EXACTLY happen as I blogged it. There is not a a workout room (unless a nerf basketball hoop suctioned to a dry erase board counts). There’s no pool. There is not a rooftop patio, although there is a collection jar for a “retractable rooftop” which seems to have roughly $5-$10 in it at any given time. It also doesn’t have a Mexican restaurant with great happy hours and I’m completely shocked because really, what office doesn’t have at least that these days???

I got a job at a web design company that specializes in search engine optimization (SEO). I’ve been there approximately a month and have already learned a few very useful things and put into practice a lot of tools and lessons that I haven’t used in quite a while. I also have a longer list of things I want to learn better and brush up on, which is a good thing. So, all in all, I stand by that statement.

“If you blog it, it will happen.” (Or perhaps the real lesson is, “If you clearly define what you want, it helps you know what to look for and how to communicate that, which also improves your chances of getting what you want.”)

I hope you are looking forward to exciting articles about search engine optimization. Don’t laugh, I’m being serious.