Brand Tags is a website which basically displays people’s perceptions of a brand visually via tag clouds. To generate these tag clouds, the website shows people a brand logo then asks them to tag that brand with the first word that comes to mind. All of these tags are then used to generate a tag cloud for that brand. Like most other tag clouds, the size of the tag reflects the amount of people submitting that particular tag. I think it’s a great social experiment and a clever idea to visually display people’s perceptions of  brands today.

In order to browse through the tag clouds of the different brands, you firstly need to tag a few brands yourself with words that come to mind. The Brand Tags website even features a “Battle Mode” where brands are placed against each other and people need to vote for the brand they like more. You can check out the leaderboard here which currently ranks Google in first place ahead of Pixar, Adidas and Apple.

So let’s see what people think of the Apple and Microsoft brands. I’ve taken a small screen shot for each brand to see what their brand perception tag cloud looks like. Check it out below or visit the Brand Tags site to see the rest of the brands.

Apple Brand Tag Cloud

We can clearly see that people associate Apple with stylish technology.

Microsoft Brand Tag Cloud

It looks like Microsoft has the power PC market in the bag.

The mascot character designs have definitely improved over the years. The 2010 mascot, Zakumi, was executed quite nicely and represents the South African country quite well. Footix (the France 1998 mascot) and Striker (the USA 1994 mascot) also do a good job of representing the host nation and capturing the hearts of children all over the world.

As for the logo designs themselves, over the years there have been a mix of very simple designs and vastly complex ones. Sometimes it seems like the basic logo design principles don’t apply to World Cup logos! Some of the designs look more like illustrative posters than logos, the South Africa 2010 logo in particular. For me, the France 1998 and USA 1994 logo designs do the job quite nicely as they are clean, simple, balanced and dynamic.

I guess we will all have our own preferences, likes and dislikes, but in the end each brand represents a worldwide sporting celebration and will go down in the history books forever.

World Cup South Africa 2010 Brand Design

World Cup Germany 2006 Brand Design

World Cup Korea/Japan 2002 Brand Design

World Cup France 1998 Brand Design

World Cup United States 1994 Brand Design

World Cup Italy 1990 Brand Design

World Cup Mexico 1986 Brand Design

World Cup Spain 1982 Brand Design

World Cup Argentina 1978 Brand Design

World Cup West Germany 1974 Brand Design

World Cup Mexico 1970 Brand Design

World Cup England 1966 Brand Design

I think France 1998 has nailed their branding well. Which one is your favourite?

When you design a logo for a client you often have a bunch of great logo design concepts left over. Your client can obviously only choose one logo design for their business. So what happens to the rest of your logos? Well mine usually end up gathering dust sitting on my computer.

Brandstack allows you to sign up for free and upload your logo designs to their brand marketplace for businesses to buy. You can even package your logo design with the corresponding domain name to make it more enticing to businesses. Best of all, you set the price and receive 85% commission on sales made. It’s a great idea for designers to make the most of their unused logos and an even better idea for businesses looking for a brand.

So how does it work?

Basically you sign up for a free account and you’ll be taken to your profile page. Once you fill out a few details you can then post your logo designs on the site by filling out a simple form. Enter your brand name, a category for your brand along with a brief description. Then upload your logo vector file and you’re good to go. You can even purchase the corresponding domain name to package it with your logo as a complete brand ready to sell. Logo submissions are moderated for quality so make sure you create your logo the right way.

Best of luck selling your brands!

As an example I will be using a logo I designed for a stock broking firm called “Petra Capital“. Petra Capital is an independently owned, boutique, Australian institutional stock broking firm, which provides specialised services to financial/institutional clients and to mining/industrial companies. The word “Petra” means “rock” in Greek.

This logo design tutorial will only take a short time to complete (around 5 minutes) and it will require Adobe illustrator, but it should give you a solid method to create future logo designs. Of course this isn’t the only way to go about designing a logo, but it does try and put some structure around the very creative and sometimes very random logo design process. Lets, get started.

Planning your logo design

Check out the competition:

It’s always a good idea to first have a look at some of your clients competitors as it will give you an idea of what is currently out there and it will also help you position your client in the market in terms of branding and corporate image. Checking out the competitors is a simple as performing a search on Google. Write down any ideas you find that could help you with your client’s logo design.

Create a colour Scheme:

Deciding on a colour scheme is an important part of any logo design. Colour psychology tells us that the company colours can greatly influence how people view the company as a whole. As a designer, deciding on the company colours at an early stage can help us better define the direction we are taking concerning the basic look and feel of the company image.

There are some great tools that can help us in deciding on company colours including Adobe Kuler and Colour Lovers. Both of these online tools allow you to search through colour schemes for inspiration and ideas. Since I was creating a logo for a stock broking firm that specialised in mining companies I searched for the following words: finance, money, corporate, clean, rock. Here is the colour scheme I created for Petra Capital:

Decide on the type of logo:

There are three basic logo types:

1. Illustrative logo: These types of logos usually consist of quite complex drawings with a lot of colours. They are quite high impact but I usually steer clear of them because they do not scale down very well due to their high level of detail. I wouldn’t recommend using illustrative logos for corporate clients.
   
2. Iconic logo: I’m a big fan of these types of logos which consist of an icon or symbol along with the logo text. Iconic logos are usually more simple and abstract, they scale down well and are quick and cheap to print due to their low detail and colour complexity.
   
3. Textual logo: This is a more traditional type of logo design which basically involves only text in the logo design. Fonts are usually tweaked to give the logo an original feel. These types of logos lack the wow factor that the iconic logos have but they can be a good choice for conservative companies like law firms and finance companies. They scale well and are great for printing.
   

I decided to go for an iconic logo design for the “Petra Capital” logo just to help it stand out a bit from the crowd.

Do some initial sketches:

Now that we know what’s out there in terms of competition and we also have a colour scheme in mind, it’s time to start thinking about the symbolism we would like to incorporate into our logo. This is probably the most challenging and timely part of the logo design process. A great way to organise your thoughts and ideas is to draw up a quick morphological matrix like the one below.

The components of your logo design go into the left hand column and your ideas or solutions go on the right. Try choosing a few combinations of your ideas to create a symbol that represents your client’s company in a simple yet clever and meaningful way. I have circled the ideas I used in the “Petra Capital” logo. Since “Petra Capital” is a stock broking firm that specialises in mining companies I decided to combine an image of mountains with a line graph that represents stock market trends. A quick sketch can be seen here.

Play with some fonts:

Now that we have planned out the colours, the logo style and also the symbolism that will be used in the logo, it’s time to start looking at some fonts. Since it can take a while to create your own font, the best alternative is to find a font you like and alter it to make it unique. A great place to search for, preview and download free and premium fonts is www.searchfreefonts.com. Download a few that you like and place them in your fonts folder on your computer. You can access your fonts folder by clicking on the start menu, going to control panel, then clicking on the fonts folder (Windows XP).

Creating your logo design

We have planned out our logo design, now it’s time for the easy part, creating it. Let’s open up Adobe Illustrator and get started. There are a few basic logo design principles to consider before we start.

• Create your logo in Adobe Illustrator as this is the industry standard. It will allow you to create a vector file that can be re-sized without any loss of quality. You will also be able to have your logo commercially printed on business cards, stationery and other promotional items.
• Make sure you create you logo using “CMYK” colour mode.
• Use Pantone colours for your logo to ensure colour accuracy. To choose a Pantone colour in Adobe Illustrator simply click on the little arrow in the top right corner of the colours palette. Then select “Pantone Solid Coated” from the options. Try to match the colours you chose originally with colours from the Pantone library.

Draw the logo symbol:

Using our initial sketch as a guide, lets draw our logo symbol using the shapes and the pen tool. The pathfinder is also useful when you need to crop or combine different shapes. I won’t go into how to use these tools as there are many tutorials that can help you with this. Once you have drawn your shapes you can then fill them with your company colours. Try to remember that your logo will also need to work in black and white colour, so keep this in mind when applying your colours and creating your symbol.

Experiment with fonts:

Type your logo text next to your logo symbol and apply the fonts you downloaded earlier. Once you find a suitable font you can outline it by holding “CTRL + SHIFT” then pressing “O”. You can tweak this font using the “Direct Selection tool” (The small white arrow in the Illustrator toolbar). Simply click on the outline of your font and move around the control points until you are happy with it. You can also add and remove control points using the pen tool. Once you are happy with the logo text you can apply your main company colour to it.

Polish and test out your logo:

The last thing that’s left to do is polish up your logo. Here are a few things to look out for:

• Scale the logo to a small business card size and make sure it still looks legible.
• test the logo in black and white colour.
• Check the kerning. Flip the logo upside-down and check that the distance between letters is even.

Now save your logo as an “.AI” file. That’s it, you’re done! You now have a professional logo design for your client as well as a method for designing logo’s quickly and easily in the future. You can see my finished “Petra Capital” logo below. Best of luck with your designs.