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:

I was stumbling along some web sites yesterday and came across a really cool Photoshop tutorial on how to create planets from panoramas. I’ve seen examples of these before, but never thought they’d be relatively easy to do in Photoshop. This person posted some fun examples that inspired me to give it a try. I suggest clicking on the tutorial above if you want to try it out yourself; it’s clear, short and has nice screenshots for us visual learners.

I made a few, most of which came out interesting in the not-so-good use of the term. The problem is that I have very few images on my computer that are well-suited for this technique. It truly works best with panoramic shots because you want a relatively simple foreground (i.e. grass or water) and a relatively simple background (i.e. sky) with a busy center.

This is more along the lines of the type of photo that works best. This is Manhattan from a boat in the Hudson River.

Welcome to Planet New York. This one is my favorite.

This is the original photo, a pic taken in London a few years ago.

This is London Planet. I like this one. It doesn't really look like a planet, but I think it's pretty anyway.

This is a really dark pic that was taken from a boat off of Manhattan during sunset.

I brightened it up a bit. This photo was small, so it looks pixelated. It was accidental, but I kind of like it that way anyway.

The photographer who wrote the tutorial has an awesome Flickr set of his planets. Take a look at them; they’re beautiful.