Living and working in Sydney, Allan peters is both a professional musician and guitar instructor. Many musical ideas revolving around Allan’s performances and tuition were explored while developing the logo.

Notes, sheet music, microphones, speakers etc. were all tried as well as performer silhouettes and stage lights before finalizing the guitar pick monogram.

Below is a page of alternate ideas as always, do any take your fancy?

a : musical note in place of p.
b : guitar body and full guitar as AP monogram.
c : guitar pics and pause symbol as letters.
d : variety of guitar pick placements to form another AP monogram.
e : microphone in place me l.
f : guitar shaped logotype.
g : allan peters sticker across a guitar case.
h : guitar pick decorated with AP initials.

Any thoughts?

Comments are always appreciated.

I knew Virgin had a quite a variety of sub brands but was surprised when reading this article on VIBE to find Richard Bransons empire is made up of more than 200 companies. Books, radio, wine, coffee, gambling, health services, basically anything you can think of.

“The extensiveness of the Virgin brand is reflected in the visual styles of the individual brands and sub-brands. In isolation, these brand identities might do their work but the problem gets visible when they are placed side by side as shown here.

Apart from the (mostly) red color and the very recognisable Virgin script typeface, many of the visual identities of the Virgin sub-brands look like they have been made overnight by the manager of the brand himself, without having to follow many rules or guidelines.”

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So you’ve decided to create a blog, before you get started take a look into these plugins. I’ve found these plug-ins essential to the smooth running, promotion, and appearance of my site.

The default wordpress installation comes with everything you need to starting blogging, but lacks a lot of what I’d consider essentials and has a few downfalls when it comes to site navigation.

Akismet

Akismet is a comment and trackback spam filter that ships with the default Wordpress installation ( at least as of version 2.7 ). The plug-in checks all comments against a collective database of spam and automatically removes them, all you need to do is get an API key from wordpress ( free ).

I think it was about 2 weeks before i got my first spam comment, a week later it was 10 in a day, a month in i got 30 in a day. You can imagine where it goes from there.

All in one SEO

The All in one SEO plug-in allows you to customize the title, meta description, keywords etc. If your serious about generating traffic for your blog you’ll want this plugin.

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“nofollow” is a html attribute for hyper links which causes the link not to pass any credit that will improve the target sites ranking in search engines.

Selfish you say? No. Read on to find out why.

The nofollow tag was created by Google as a means of reducing spam, primarily on web pages where users can add their own links e.g. blog comments.

In the past, spammers were able to trawl blogs leaving behind them a sea of useless comments such as “good post” with links attached to there own websites.

The google search engine would then discover these links and assuming that a large amount of inbound links equaled a popular, quality site it would rank the site higher and higher in the search results as the volume of links increased, despite the fact that the site may have little or no useful content.

Links left in comments on your blog can still be click and viewed as per normal, rewarding any genuine readers for taking the time to respond to your post, while the implementation of the nofollow tag has removed any reason for link spammers to target your site.

Most blog themes are set to nofollow comment links automatically, or would be added by the designer of your custom theme. To easily check if you’re blog is using nofollow view the source of your webpage in your browser and look for rel=”nofollow” in your comment links.

What are your thoughts?

Does your blog use dofollow? Has this increased your spam?

While digging through the mountain of my archived study notes and projects from my diploma, I dug up a little reference guide I was given with some of the more detailed terms involved with professional printing.

I thought I’d share this for any up-and-coming designers who might still be a little unsure on what’s what. If you’ve taken an interest in this post I’ll assume you know the basics such as bleed, trim, process colour etc…

1P, 2P, 4P : 1 page, 2 page, 4 page

4CP : 4 colour process

4CP + 1 special : A 4 colour process job + an emboss or die-cut etc. The special may also be a Pantone colour, though this is typically referred to as a 5 colour job.

GMV / MMV / SMV : Gloss, matte or satin machine varnish, respectively

Spot GMV / MMV / SMV : Spot gloss, matte or satin machine varnish, respectively

UV varnish : Screen needed as a seperate screen print process, may be UV lithography

Celloglaze : Plastic film coating applied with heat and pressure

Trim to guillotine : Straight edge cut made with a guillotine

Knife cut : The same as a die cut

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