Drew Yates

Saved From Fizbang

Logo “touch-up” is one of our most frequent requests. Our final work must be more effective, more visually appealing, and most importantly, recognizable as a revision of the old logo. How do we go about this? I wrote this guide both to offer potential business clients insight into our graphic design process and to help aspiring graphic designers.

• Logo Design Objectives
• Tips for Improving Logos
• Apple’s and Microsoft’s Logos
• How We Improve a Logo
• Conclusion

Logo Design Objectives

Formless creativity is great for abstract, exploratory artwork, but a logo has a task to accomplish: identify your business. Therefore, we need objectives to help formulate our design process. By judging how a design meets its objectives, we can evaluate how effectively a design accomplishes its task. Logo design objectives we use are:

• Attractiveness: You want your logo to make people feel satisfied and pleased
• Recognizability: A logo must not only be attractive, but able to associate those good feelings with your business’s identity
• Flexibility: To use your attractive and recognizable logo, it must be able to withstand many different presentations and still maintain its integrity. For example, your logo must be able to be printed on a poster, displayed on a website, and printed on a fax

These objectives have some fuzzy corollaries that are not always true, but are worthy of note:

• Simple: Every additional element is a potential distraction and every extra detail is one more thing to forget
• Few Colors: More color is extra detail and too many different colors may make your logo garish, difficult to modify and reproduce, and even less recognizable
• Words: Words are easy to remember, can be spoken, and can have very dense meanings without complex graphics. Even companies with primarily symbolic logos like Nike have text alternatives

Tips for Improving Logos

Next, we translate these design objectives into executable tasks. The following tips help us better accomplish design objectives when improving an existing logo.

Sand off those “Special Effects”

A logo that depends on fancy special effects is not a solid logo. “Special effects” include drop shadows, bevels, lens flares, reflections, and stylistic filters. We remove these effects to distill the underlying logo concept so that we can better improve it. Only once the logo concept is strong by itself should you experiment with special effects …and even then, only in moderation. Also, since special effects are used as crutches by bad designers, the effects themselves are usually tacky. For some “groovy” perspective, see Microsoft’s original logo.

Don’t Add, Only Subtract

Every element in a logo is a potential distraction and every extra detail is one more thing to forget. The most successful logos of the biggest companies are usually one or two words with maybe one simple symbol. Be absolutely ruthless while subtracting from your logo. Leave only the most important elements.

No Photographs

Photographs, pieces of photographs, and bitmapped images like photographs do not belong in a logo. They don’t scale and are difficult to recognize, especially when your logo is resized. Replace photographic elements with a symbol equivalent (or remove them completely).

Multiple Versions

Once your logo concept is solid, sometimes you’ll need different logo versions for specific uses. For instance, you may need a logo for printing on dark backgrounds, a version that is very small, or a very simple version for photocopy and fax. A strong logo must be flexible.

Legibility

Small print text blurs when the logo is small, decorative fonts are difficult to read, and low contrast colors hide your text. Text should typically be large, use conservative fonts, and have high contrast with its background. Unreadable text is ugly and wasteful.

Scaling and Spacing

People like certain ratios common in nature so use them in your logo to improve its composition. The most famous natural ratio is the “golden ratio” Phi. (about 1.618) Also, use the typographic scale for to keep your font sizes “in tune.” In good design, these natural ratios appear often. But don’t rely on intuition; break out those rulers and calculators and verify those ratios. Yes… calculators. See? Math is good for everything. (fact)

Vectors

Vector graphics are shapes, lines, and colors that can be mathematically defined. A vector master-copy of your logo is important, especially for printing and for maintaining the integrity of your logo. A logo only saved as a bitmap (or worse, only as physical copy) like a jpg or tiff can’t be enlarged, loses data when shrunk, and usually prints poorly. What looks good on a computer screen rarely looks good in print.

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Apple’s and Microsoft’s Logos

Observe how these two common logos improve over years as they better fulfill logo design objectives.

Apple

A vintage Apple logo from an old “A is for Apple” advertisement.

Eventually the logo text was dropped to emphasize Apple’s distinctive “apple” symbol.

Apple replaces the rainbow colors with a single color. The logo becomes the “apple” symbol itself instead of the rainbow apple graphic.

Free from a color scheme and text, the distinctive “apple” symbol can be successfully embellished without obscuring the core logo design. Mmmmmm… shiny….

Update 1-12-06: There is, in fact, an even earlier version of the Apple logo. Thanks, Ted!

Microsoft

Check out this vintage “Micro-Soft” logo. “Fancy” (for the 70’s) special effects, no flexibility (resizing this logo blurs the fine lines), bad spacing and scaling… Remember this logo when piling on all those “cool” Photoshop layer effects and filters —what’s stylish today probably won’t be stylish tomorrow. Groovy…

Much better. “Micro” and “Soft” are combined to form “Microsoft.” The text-only logo style is preserved, but the “Groovy Text Effect” is dropped. To make the logo distinctive, a notch is added to the “o” and the “f” and “t” are connected.

The simpler, modern Microsoft logo is easily modified to display on a blue background since the logo doesn’t rely on any complex color schemes to be effective.

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How We Improve A Logo

So how would we step-by-step improve a sample logo? For example purposes only, here is a pretty typical logo:

Here is a copy of the same logo in a smaller size next to the logo as it appears on a website.

If we wanted to improve this logo, where would we start? First, we would strip details like shadows, bevels and small type to make a vectorized copy of the logo.

Next, we would focus the logo by removing extra elements. The grey “ink splotch” can be subtracted since the pen and the word “ink” already represent the “ink” idea. Also, the grey ink blob conflicts with with the text and its not very distinctive. With the ink blob removed, the resulting logo looks like this:

Not too bad. Now the pen element is much more emphasized and the text is easier to read. Next, since legibility at small sizes was a major flaw in the original logo, we would shrink the logo to verify its small-size presentation.

While the new logo is much more readable than the old logo, at this size, the bold font is now too bold and it’s hurting the logo’s legibility. To correct this, we would make an alternate “small-size” version of the logo. Here is the result.

Much better. Notice that this new version is easily recognized as an evolution of Interactive Ink logo since it borrows the same type face style, the blue ink pen, and the words “interactive ink” in the same general positions.

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Conclusion

Logo design, like all good design, requires discipline and objectives to be successful. By understanding what a logo is meant to accomplish, a logo can be designed much more effectively. Most businesses and organizations rely on their logo to represent their collective identity. How effectively does your logo represent you?

As always, comments and questions are welcome.

By: Drew Yates

Saved from The Idiot Startup

Imagine that a magic genie grants you this one wish for your business: the Best Marketing xor the Best Product. Which do you choose?

Choose marketing!

You’re not selling math proofs to God, you’re selling goods and services to consumers. As a business, you must convince people that what you have is worth more than its price. How can you do this?

• Marketing: choose yourself how your market should value your product.
• Product: the market chooses how it should value your product.

Wouldn’t you prefer that you yourself chose how valuable the market considers your product to be —rather than hoping the market recognizes how valuable it is by itself? Of course!

After all, how do we decide what is “valuable” or not, anyways? How do we decide what needs we have beyond simple biology? How do we know that can of sugar-water is worth $.50, while that slimmer can of sugar-water is worth $4? How do we know that we should be drinking sugar-water out of a can at all?

Marketing.

Even if you really have a superior product, how will people recognize it to be valuable enough for you to make a profit? Marketing.

Most people see spam and think: trash bin. Others think: Why, what curious happenstance. My phallic prowess has been somewhat lacking of late. Perhaps these fine oriental medicinalists accept Mastercard?

But one Midwest man didn’t see just spam. He saw business opportunity. How do I know? No, my manhood is quite satisfactorily virile and comparable to the national average.

No, I worked for the guy who shipped your Internet spam pills.

Yep, I was an $8-an-hour 16-year-old secret weapon. Or secret something. Or whatever. I did stuff —like drink lots free Mountain Dew, design web pages, and, um, write business-critical online software. By myself. Unsupervised. Sometimes on the fly on the live server (ASP 2.0, yo). But, dude, free Mountain Dew!

First, let me just say that these pills do sell —like hotcakes —and if hotcakes sell anything like penis pills, that’s a shitload of pancakes. Yep, people really are as stupid as you have always suspected. Entire species of critter have gone nearly extinct over rumors no more sophisticated than that powered Narwhal horn will convince Krystal in HR that your dick is huge and belongs indefinitely lodged up her ass. That’s just marketing that can’t compete with fancy modern education.

But my startup wasn’t just about helping morons spawn on credit. No, we were a complete online fulfillment service, complete with customizable shopping cart software, a warehouse with real inventory, and a full one-and-a-half developers. I was the one-half.

How did I have time to work? Since this was the Midwest, I could rattle a stream of technical jargon to skip school. Since adults stuck working in a suburban high school are both simultaneously terrified of technology and loathe to admit that the stupid kids they babysit understand the world better than they do, this worked great. I was already getting straight A’s, and I was already kind of an obnoxious kid to have in class, so most teachers happy to be rid of me, and I was happy to be gone.

So if you were ever wondering: “Huh. I wonder who runs this website that I trust with my credit card, my full name and address, and evidence of my small penis?”

…Me. Yep. Feel better? Dude, don’t worry, we didn’t have the sophistication to know if our unencrypted database of credit cards, names, addresses, and transaction history was compromised in our unlocked server room next to our barely supervised warehouse, so we never had to report any troubling security incidents. No knowing, no problem! I learned that in high school history class.

But we didn’t just provide fulfillment services for the humble e-herbalist helping you fight a ruthless pharmaceutical conspiracy for a mere $29.99. No, we provided online fulfillment services for the entire Internet! Could you ship us a box of crap? Did you have a credit card? Congratulations! Welcome to the exciting world of e-commerce.

So you must be thinking: wow, this place seems dubious. And you’d be wrong, because we totally had, like, standards. First, developers always got free Mountain Dew. Second, nobody had to dress better than the CEO, Founder, and President God, which was usually socks, sandals, shorts, and a shirt bought by the half-dozen in a plastic bag. Personally, I usually went barefoot. Third, nothing illegal. Official policy was “how much bitching will we have to put up with if we sell this?” Finally, no vanity items. They never sell. Ever. That was the one sin unforgivable in an industry of sin.

The worst offenders were the “self-published enlightened libertines.” After all, why be merely published when you could also be a best selling entrepreneur and technologist? No, seriously. Stop calling our receptionists. Keep your shit out of our warehouse.

But the worst of the worst was the guy who wrote “the book of purposely bad poetry.”

It was bestiality love poetry between a woman and her CGI pet elephant. It had artwork. Like… seriously.

And even our well-hardened customer rep (too well accustomed to the horrors of the Internet) was unable to deter elephant-penis-sized pseudonymous creative ambitions. Ordinarily, as development, I was well-sheltered from customers. That department was on the entire other side of the room. But when our rep couldn’t smoke enough cigarettes to keep this creep off the phones, I decided that it was time to call the big guns: the unbridled cruelness of a bored teenager.

I looked up our poet’s real name and home address (and credit card), made a fake hotmail email account, and sent him this:

Dear Mr. [Our Poet]:

It has come to my attention that in your work, “[Name Of Work],” you have illegally and without attribution plagiarized several passages from my previous and well-received academic work, “A Natural Discourse of Bestial Poetry and It’s Physiological Impact on Feminine Sexuality.”

I demand that you either remove the passages in question or include proper citation. I have contacted my attorney and I plan to press copyright violation charges to the fullest extent of the law. I will mail you a copy of the legal paperwork at your home address at [home address].

Thank you for your immediate response and cooperation.

Professor Johnathan Swartzstien, PhD
John Paul University
Department of Human Sociology

In the time it takes to grab a fresh Mountain Dew, a response appears. Apologetic, conciliatory… he took the bait! And who said that late night AOL trolling didn’t have real-world business applications? Gleefully, I cracked another Mountain Dew and rattled out the killing blow:

[The Poet],

Oops, you’re a fucking idiot, dumbass. There is no professor, and your book sucks. Nobody will ever buy it, read it, like it, or know about it. Your website is also the worst piece of shit that I’ve ever seen. My eyes are bleeding. Stop calling [my company], we don’t like you, and we are making fun of you right now. You’re not smart, funny, interesting, clever, or creative. Maybe you should try washing the ketchup stains out of your sweatpants before you try writing again. No, better yet, never write anything ever. No actually, kill yourself. Seriously. Nobody likes you. Even strangers make fun of you on the Internet. You should just shoot yourself in gut, just so you can feel the slow excruciating pain that everyone else around must suffer. Please die.

Sincerely,

Drew, your friendly fulfillment service representative

The next day, courtesy of our creepy poet friend, I had an Internet Psychologist personal dossier (quite damning), an Internet Lawyer libel suit (quite threatening) and a subscription to every spam list (did we sell this?). But our poet never called the office again, I got to be the office hero for a day, and my boss didn’t even care. Dude, awesome!

I eventually graduated my shitty high school and left for shitty state college. And my old fulfillment Internet startup? Business was so great that they outgrew our shitty Midwest town and went bankrupt for lack of capital and talent. It was a classic problem of getting too excited and busting too soon.

We definitely had a pill for that.

I’ve been updating the Fizbang site (my personal contracting/consulting business) the last few days. While updating the portfolio, also began to update my “old projects” on this site. Old stuff. School stuff.

I’m depressed.

But I’ve chosen to lead. I’ve chosen to create. Depression is failure. What’s causing it?

All this week, as I’ve been updating Fizbang, I yearn to delete. Wipe clean. This isn’t part of the plan. This isn’t what I want to do. Where does this lead me? Tangles.

All this week, as I’ve been rifling through old computer files. Dead projects. Lost, at least lost to me. Old sores burned in my mind where they plucked these thoughts out of me. Chucked into some pit, I suppose. Some stuck to the walls, I see. That’s nice. Isn’t it nice to see the walls decorated so nicely? Like mother like son, I suppose.

Who is they? Am I they?

I hesitate to write these bitter thoughts; yet, I indulge myself —just a bit. Only a taste. Only a spoonful. I don’t mean to eat all of it. I don’t mean to drink the whole thing. Let’s save the rest in the cupboard to finish for later. Well, perhaps a bit more won’t hurt, right? Is this schoolwork at the bottom of the bag?

My stomach hurts.

Writing validates. Curses feed memory. Neglect to remember your enemies and they die. Is this my life? Tangles soaking curses, dark and sickly green, fetid, moist. Dripping, steaming, stretching. Sweet and soft and safe —or safer? The stench you know smells like home.

I know the problem. Am I ready or am I comfortable?

What’s that smell?

I broke my promise to not keep a resume and made a resume. I broke my promise to not be employed and sought employment. Oh sure, I reasonably reasoned reasonable reasons. I need grounding. I need money. I need more contacts, more skill, more experience, more choice, more time.

I have a plan. I have a goal. I have a partner. What’s this Fizbang contracting shit?

I remember thinking that if it’s not published, then it doesn’t exist. But who am I publishing for? This crap work for other people, for dead, boring projects, for school —does anyone care about this shit?

I know who cares. The people who read my resume. Am I good enough to be employed? To be used? To retreat?

I read my resume. Tangles.

Is the world a better because my portfolio is better? Am I better? Better than what? Who decides?

Am I my work? Who am I?

Let’s find out.

I’m deleting everything but this blog —this blog and anything directly related to my goal. I’ll post any writing from my other sites that’s worth keeping here.

Cuts and fresh air.

Goodbye, work. You were pretty decent, too. Oh well.

Meanwhile, this picture reminds me of someone.

My (new) .emacs, corresponding elisp code

Free bonus! Quick one-line bash script to fix your website file permissions! (update: thanks, Mike!)


chmod -R u=rwX,g=rX,o=rX .


Notable new packages:

• Icicles: more features to auto-complete commands and help reveal new functionality. I especially like the shift-tab “reg-exp” command auto-complete and hot-key suggests.
• pabbrev: autocompletes words from words in buffers. I set f8 to manually parse the entire buffer. It’s like an IDE autocomplete, but it works with any text and doesn’t use libraries. I’m considering replacing it with PredictiveMode sometime soon when it seems more stable.
• nXML and nXHTML mode: FINALLY! An XHTML mode that doesn’t suck! I found nXML mode from a tip from persephone. By itself, nXML was much better than the SGML / HTML html-helper-mode for editing XHTML —notably, it actually worked. nXHTML is a very nicely written extension of nXML that supports multiple major modes in the same buffer. For example, I can use nXML, CSS, and ECMA modes all at once in the same document. Unlike MMM (used by HTMLModeDeluxe), nXHTML isolates regions and only enables a single major mode at a time. To me, this seems like a more intuitive solution despite that the author claims that this is a hack around nXML’s and MMM’s incompatibility.
• MozLab’s MozRepl: Wow. I can directly interact with Firefox using Javascript in an emacs buffer.
• Emacs Code Browser (ecb): An IDE-like environment for emacs. I personally had some hassle configuring this: first, the entire package caused emacs to run 50% of my processor while idle. I manually installed the packages that I wanted, but the version-checking for Speedbar wasn’t working right and I had to comment out the check. After this trouble; it seems to work fine. Semantic is cool —it displays function information in the status bar— but it flags derivative-mode languages like PHP and Javascript as “invalid” by red-underlining everything. Annoying. I turned it off. Semantic seems to work very well with elisp code, though. I toggle ecb with f7.
• Ruby and Ruby on Rails: one of my goals is to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and this mode seems make editing Ruby in emacs much more enjoyable. Check out this screencast of RoR in emacs!

Fixes

There is a bug in nXHTML’s html-inlined mode that automatically sets the point at the beginning of the line whenever a left or right parenthesis is typed while in a “narrowed” major mode. Here is the hack I came up with to bypass this (very) annoying behavior:

nxhtml/html-inlined.el


(defun left-paren-hack ()
(interactive)
(princ "(" (current-buffer)))
(defun right-paren-hack ()
(interactive)
(princ ")" (current-buffer)))
(defun html-inlined-make-inlined-keymap(inlined-key)
(let ((m (make-sparse-keymap)))
(define-key m inlined-key 'html-inlined-widen)
(define-key m [(control ?x) ?n ?w] 'html-inlined-widen)
(define-key m "(" 'left-paren-hack)
(define-key m ")" 'right-paren-hack)
(setq html-inlined-inlined-keymap m)))


note: I appended the existing keymap for “(” and “)”

You guys are awesome. I rewrote my .emacs file and it seems with these new packages and some updates that life is good again. Sure, I didn’t get any real work done today, but fiddling with your dev tools counts… right?

I had written something here about how I was getting angry at emacs for not working nicely with my web dev software, but really, there probably isn’t any tool that’s going to make me totally happy. I’ve been researching and there are quite a few interesting packages for emacs that I didn’t know about like Emacs Code Browser… so I feel a little better, now.

I forgot that today was a weekend-day, and so when the train didn’t come “on-time,” I realized that I was going to miss a meeting with a friend in San Jose. I had only 15 minutes, and the next train wouldn’t arrive in Mountain View until 30 minutes later.

So what did I do? I rode my bike from Mountain View to San Jose. This ended up being an hour and a half bike ride at top cruising speed.

Now, my metabolism is voracious. I think that I’ve been under-eating lately (not intentionally), and since this bike ride, I’ve been eating everything in my apartment. I had to go the grocery store and buy a bunch of fats and proteins, and I didn’t think that I would have even been able to sleep tonight because of hunger pains. I also bought the off-brand of pecan cookies. Disappointing —I know better, now. Free, mostly full bag of cookies if anyone wants them…

The curse of intelligence is that you simultaneously know how truth can hurt you, and yet you know that selectively withholding information is dishonest. Preferably, you can share truth without the accountability. Perhaps that’s the reason why “prove by action, never argument” is such good advice.

Yesterday, I made unfortunate mistake of visiting WalMart to buy paper towels and a broom. Oh. Oh wow. Please, give me the DMV, but please, please, no more WalMart. Sweat pants and neon plastic flip flops? Why not staple a sign to your head that says: “I give up on life”? (The lines were really long, too.)

At University, we learn that everyone is exactly equal. To claim otherwise is racist, or sexist, or 3 out of 5 on the sociology lecture quiz (dun dun dunnn). I know that biological differences between largely self-contained genetic groups (or “races,” if you prefer) and sexes are measurably minor. But that doesn’t make them equal, nor does that make the differences insignificant. I’m not making a value judgment, I’m merely stating a very obvious fact. It’s not worth discussing further here; this isn’t Kindergarden Cop.

But what race means to the meaning-craving human mind isn’t biology, but culture. Because facial features and skin color are so obvious, race becomes a quick and dirty mental shortcut to infer one’s culture (similar to how long hair and tight clothing is a quick and dirty mental shortcut to infer one’s sex… from a distance). But this is backwards. Race doesn’t “cause” culture. Race merely correlates with what culture that you’re most likely to be born into.

Knowing this doesn’t change the way my brain works.

So at WalMart, I notice the Indian families are working together as a team to efficiently purchase several carts of practical household items without having to each wait in separate lines. I notice the attractive Chinese and Filipino girls hanging on the arms of their (mostly white) boyfriends. I notice that most of the Mexican and white men in the store are alone and wear stained t-shirts. They stand hunched, staring at the floor.

And I notice the gaggle of single, black, landbeast women pushing a single cart. It’s precariously overloaded with an enormous television box and snack food. And I notice their dirty black children bouncing around the very busy checkout lane, snatching the trash hawked in the isles and hustling for trinkets. Mm, is dat sum deep-fried, double-serve chocolate ranch Doritos? Iz gotsta have it!

Black people are statistically more likely to be poorer, fatter, and dumber. So, our brains assume that being black causes you poor, fat, and dumb. Wrong. That’s the conclusion our brains want to make because our brains are stupid. That’s why we’re superstitious. Rather, black American ghetto culture makes you poor, fat, and dumb —or at least, more likely to be. And, of course, if you’re race is black, then you’re more likely to be a member of this culture more than any other race. I suspect that if this black American culture suddenly —magically— vanished, then these nasty black-blight themes would also vanish. Sure, basketball teams might have have more blacks, but the cultural disparity that exist today would seem absurd. For example, anymore in places like Silicon Valley (where I live), being racially Asian is as remarkable to Caucasians as having red hair. Sure, people notice, but it’s not a mark of significant cultural friction unless you don’t speak English fluently (and not even then sometimes if you’re an engineer). Don’t take my word for it; note all the Caucasian-Asian mixed-raced 20-30-somethings in the area.

Yet, I almost never see blacks and whites on the same street, let alone in the same career or family.

And don’t say it’s because “they’re poor.” Poor is an immediate lack of money, not a culture. College students are poor, too, but they don’t tend to stay that way.

So what the fuck is wrong with black America? Does culture have to be so taboo that it can’t be discussed? It’s tragic. Absolutely fucking tragic. Yes, I’m picking on blacks, and yes, this is a much broader, much more complicated problem. But it’s still like growing up black and a train hits your parents —except it’s the 9am Ghetto Bling Bling Express.

Convincing people that racism is wrong because everyone is exactly equal is as irrational as convincing people that murder is wrong because religion says so (not your religion, that other one you don’t like). The conclusion might be right, but the premise is a myth. And who knows what nonsense you can “prove” if 2+2=5? But people aren’t rational, and since I don’t support racism nor murder, I’m reluctant to tinker with this idea too aggressively. But I’d still call you a liar to your face if you claimed to be teaching me something remotely within the realm of an intellectual understanding of reality. Sorry, but even though you’re a “professional graduate student,” “that’s divisive” isn’t an argument. Hey, you didn’t seem too worried about what’s “divisive” when you glorified tribal hunter-and-gather culture over the evils of both Western AND Eastern civilization. Because… hunters-and-gathers have “better food variety” (corn will kill you) and only had to work 10 hours a week… ? Yah, I got a B in anthropology for that. That, and I never studied, bought the book, took notes, or regularly attended class. Whatever, I probably saved myself a few brain cells.

More Reading

• Affirmative Action: A Klan’s Eye View by, pjammer. A good parody about a related topic. Good intentions don’t make a bad theory good (but they do seem to help keep bad theories around…).
• I discovered the Half Sigma blog after reading “Why a career in computer programming sucks,” linked from news.ycombinator.com. Half Sigma’s amoral, logical, and politically irreverent essays are not helping me maintain a prudent, liberal facade here near the beating heart of the liberal beast: San Fransisco. Sorry, but as a good skeptic, I’m obligated to doubt all ideologies…