Namics is a web design, development & IT company based in Germany. After seeing their new logo design, a near paragraph of text set in Arial, I was unimpressed to say the least. As I read on however, the design took an interest twist.
Described by design studio Head, Namics new branding is “real time corporate identity”, an ever changing mark ranging from a single word to billboard size bodies of copy.
When launching a new web page or blog, the design itself is only half the work. There’s also a lot of I’s to dot and T’s to cross when it comes to things like search engine optimization, traffic analysis and points of contact.
None of these factors have any effect on the appearance of your site and can be overlooked, here I’ve compiled a list of forget me nots for your next ( or recent ) web page or blog.
Search engine optimization
At a minimum you should need the basic SEO of title, description and keywords. e.g.
You should also have a sitemap. A sitemap is a list of your entire sites content, this list is read by search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. and ensures all your content is promptly discovered.
There are 2 plug-ins, All in One SEO and Google XML sitemap which manage both these for you if your running a Wordpress blog. You can read more about these and other useful plugins here.
Check your contact and form details
This ones pretty straight forward, check your email address and any mailto: links are correct and also any contact or submission forms are working.
I’m sure you’d hate to find 3 months down the track that your point of contact isn’t working.
Every now and then we see an advertisement that for one reason or another doesn’t quite get the message across. I’m working on some anti binge drinking posters at the moment and while doing some research stumbled across this little gem.
It’s an advertisement from around 1919, admittedly anti-drinking is a hard sell but what do you think of this approach?
Meet you at the pub?
I might have gone a different way…
Located around 2 hours north of Sydney, Vera Oils is a grower and producer of culinary oils and vinegars. Previously the brand didn’t really have a logo to speak of and was using an photograph of an olive and their mark.
While their products are primarily olive based, owner Marcus felt a photograph was too specific ( not to mention photographs don’t make for good logos anyway ) and not appropriate for all their products and hence a new design was needed.
It was important to Marcus that the logo focus on the ingredients of their products and quality is their primary goal. Several ideas were explored such as the using oils themselves, olive branches and various representation of growth and nature.
At the time, Marcus’s budget allowed for a redesign of the logo and corporate stationery but not their range of product packaging. As a result the olive silhouette was chosen to fill the void of the existing logo while being simple but distinct enough to apply to their range of products.
As always here is a handful of sketches of alternate logo design ideas.
a,b : using a drop of oil and olive respectively as an a .
c : olive brand forming the r.
d : V monogram holding a splash of liquid.
e : dove with an olive branch.
f : dove with olive branch also forming a V monogram.
g : simple olive silhouette which evolved into the final mark.
h : V monogram using an olive branch.
i : Veras a represented by an oil decanter.
What do you think?
Comments are welcome as always.
“Does someone in your studio use one of these typefaces? Does it make your typographically sensitive skin crawl? You can help. Order this poster and make your hack designing colleague take this pledge and sign it. Preferably in their own blood. Hell, you might be an offender and need to sign one yourself. Make a difference. Do it today.”
*Chuckle*
A clever typographic poster to decorate your studio, available in print here from Lure Design.
