Bad graphic design: Tips for improving your visual identity

Key quotes:

• "This trend is strongly present in the world of graphics and logo design."
• "Well, when looking at the company logo design you should immediately see more than one shape."
• "Real Estate Logo Redesign You have made some changes to your company, but these alternations did not affect the overall direction of our business (e.g."
• "you decided to open multiple locations instead of one, and you want to draw attention of the new, previously unknown customers.) It is evident that your logo is already past their best times regarding design trends, but it has become so recognisable that a drastic change could bring more harm than good."
• "However, with a logo in the latest version, I consider this company as an innovative one (still, customers have to verify its quality on their own once they choose a product, but this is an entirely different story)."
• "Redesigning a logo will not impress customers who in general don’t pay attention to how a logo looks."

Transcript: What's up everyone I'm Matthew encina I'm a creative director here at blind and the future today I'm going to review a poster design a logo design and design style frame and the reason why I'm covering a breadth of work is just to show you that design principles are the same no matter what you're doing so things for scale contrast legibility all of these things are important in everything that you do across all design mediums just so you guys know affinity designer is sponsoring this episode and we'll be using their app to critique your work get into it so the first design we're gonna be looking at is submitted by Liam Liam created this poster for a company who was hosting a FIFA World Cup night I really like how he used just typography for this he used the different country codes here BR a CRI I think the hierarchy is pretty nice so we have this bolder game at night right here in the center and then the details to the right I feel like we could push the hierarchy a little bit better so it's a little bit clearer because for me when I... See more →

Key quotes:

• "If you are not a trained graphic designer, all the software tutorials in the world are not going to help you become one overnight and produce a professional quality log worthy of representing your brand."
• "You Ask Designers to Create on Spec — You put an ad up online asking local graphic designers to send you their ideas for a logo for your business so that you can choose the one you like best."
• "A good graphic designer may be looking for new clients but not ones who want them to trade their work for the possibility that they may eventually be paid for it."
• "Not Getting Feedback Before you Go to Print — Feedback from colleagues, business associates and yes, clients if you already have some, is a very important part of the logo design process and if you don’t solicit those options you could shoot yourself in the foot."

Key quotes:

• "According to Business Dictionary, a brand is a unique design, sign, symbol, words, or a combination of these, employed in creating an image that identifies a product and differentiates it from its competitors."
• "To create proper brand identity, designers need to get deep into the details about business goals as well as do a research of the market and its target audience."
• "Here we’ve divided a branding process into six essential stages which designers need to go through on the way of brand creation."
• "Of course, it’s not a designer who sets the goals of a company or defines its personality still it is a foundation of all the branding process."
• "Moreover, before designers start working on a visual part, they need to identify the character which company or product wants to present."
• "Mascots are the custom design characters created to represent the brand in a quite symbolic way."

Key quotes:

• "As designers, we strive to create the best brand identities we can, but sometimes things don’t go the way we want them too."
• "For this process, I will walk you through all the steps that I use to create a brand identity."
• "Over time, I’ve changed the way I do things, hence the process I use to create brand identities."
• "Since the process is a series of steps, you can apply it repeatedly on all of your future projects, and all you need to think about is how to improve it with each opportunity."

Transcript: When it comes to logo design craftsmanship is paramount I say that because you can spend a lot of time researching a client's business product or service and glean information that will help you uncover insights and make connections that lead to a unique concept but that idea can still fall short and fail if it's not crafted well the lifelong challenge for every designer is to do both well smart research and thinking combined with equally impeccable attention to detail when crafting your visual identity let me go over four areas I feel are essential to creating a strong and well-crafted logo design whenever I work on a logo design project one of the first things I do when I move to vector and I start building out my designs is I think through the typography I want to use when selecting typography you want to look for typefaces that reinforce a concept or goes with the style of the graphic mark you're creating so here you can see three different logo projects I've worked on I'm gonna zoom in so you guys can see these better this was one four it was like an interactive virtual surgery application... See more →

Key quotes:

• "Don’t use Photoshop; your logo needs to be in vector format and scalable."
• "but don’t just dump images randomly, be mindful of what they mean in regards with your client brief."
• "Color is subjective so don’t let that get in the way in the inception phase."
• "Reflecting the logo vertically or horizontally will help you see inconsistencies and kerning problems where is the case but mainly will force your brain to see shapes."
• "Every logo design needs to steam personality, so use negative or positive tracking (the equal space between letters)."
• "Just draw horizontal and vertical lines to define the full height and width of your logo."