Logomark for Martin Newcombe Property Maintenance.

I’d love to pretend we had sheets and sheets of sketches and refinement, but in all honesty a 5 minute chat with my Creative Partner Mark Girvan confirmed that we needed to sum up Property and Maintenance in a single simple mark, and then I sketched the solution on the back of an envelope.Half an hour later, we’d drawn it up.

I believe this is by Buddy Creative, there’s not much on the site but you can read more on the logo design process here.

Combination logomark for Henri Ehrhart.

The curves symbolise the vine shoots from which Ehrhart grapes are grown, as well as the hills of the Alsace region and the roundness of the grapes hanging from the vines.

Designed by David Airey, David also runs a blog dedicated to logo design, plenty more to see over at logo design love.

Logo type for Families. I couldn’t dig up much design-process wise, but there’s plenty of info around on designer Herb Lubalin.

A lot of that history, at least in the graphic arts, had been written—and designed—by Herb Lubalin. And Lubalin has been recognized, awarded, written about, imitated and emulated for it. There’s hardly anyone better known and more highly regarded in the business.

Quote taken from the AIGA website.

What are your favorites?

A few tough choices deciding, so many good graphic logo designs and wordmarks to choose from.

Nadine Chahine is a type designer and Arabic specialist for international type foundry Linotype GmbH. Nadine recently released her latest latin adaptation, Neue Helvetica Arabic.

The design is intended to be a companion to Neue Helvetica, and while the typeface was met much praise, there were an equal amount of unsure readers and a handful of slamming reviews.

Nadine describes the typeface as “a mono-linear design with very little contrast“, and yet Helvetica is neither of these.

Two key points of the design brief were;

• Design a typeface that would be the Arabic companion to Neue Helvetica.
• The Arabic version would be true to Arabic script aesthetics and be able to function on its own as well.

Admittedly I know nothing about Arabic typography, but when reading on, these objectives seem destined to conflict. Continue reading...

Tis the season as they say, only 13 sleeps until Christmas. A time of music, even if it is only the same 5 songs played over and over and… eating, singing, dancing and gift giving.

With that in mind, in case you were all wondering what to chip in for and get me for Christmas I put aside some time to create a modest little list for you. Because hey, that’s just the thoughtful kind of guy I am.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Macs to be honest, but with the release of the new 27″ iMac I’m beginning to come around. Continue reading...

Choosing the right web hosting can be a test to say the least. There are dozens of prominent hosts, each offering a handful of services all of which seem to have as many positive reviews as they do condemning ones.

While shared hosting is obviously the most affordable, a decent host usually charging a hundred and something dollars a year, it does have it’s downsides. With hundreds of users running on the same server, available resources can be slim and your site is at the mercy of your neighbours. One bad script or a surge from Digg can bring the whole thing crashing down.

After soldiering on for about 6 months with shared hosting and experiencing much of the above, I’ve finally seen the light and moved to a dedicated server with a new host, Media Temple, who so far have been great.

Continue reading...

Google’s pagerank is a topic of much debate, and while there are many theories as to the who/what/why/where/when of Google, cold hard facts are in short supply.

For the sake of this article lets just say traffic includes gaining backlinks, social networking and all the normal SEO, so I don’t have to repeat myself.

Many will tell you that you should work towards gaining a high pagerank which will in turn yield high traffic. Just as many will tell you that pagerank is just a reflection of your traffic and is the result of a popular site, not the reason for one.

While the latter certainly sounds more reasonable and is the theory I subscribe to, my own experience suggest otherwise. Above you will see my Google Analytics traffic for the last 7 or so months, and my jump to pagerank 3 in mid September. Continue reading...