Design Makeover with Layers Magazine

Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 10:28 AM | Category: Meryl's Notes Blog 2 comments

While reading Layers Magazine by the pool on a hot Texas day, I flipped to the “Design Makeover” column where the magazine offered readers the opportunity to request a makeover. So I sent an email and the result is three distinctive logo designs in the September / October issue. You can download the PDF files here (make sure you scroll down as each file has more than one page of stuff).

You can download and preview the logos. Paul likes the red one best by Randy Nicholson. They’re all good work.

I’ve admired many of the logos presented in the Sitepoint Design Contests. Users can create a contest with a prize along with logo requirements. The prizes vary. I had thought about giving that a shot. FYI: It costs $20 to create a listing and then a decent prize to encourage high quality results.

There was a design a few months back for Subtractions and Nouns. I like the site’s final logo — not crazy about the color, but there are more designs like it with different colors in the contest’s forum.

Based on this, it looks like I prefer a simple and flat image especially since they print well and show up clearly in different media and colors. Karen Johnson‘s version of the meryl.net logo comes close to this and I like the curly bracket that can be viewed as the { in CSS and turned on its side looks like a book. She did a great job — the colors didn’t ring with me, but it’s on the right track and could lead to the perfect logo. The M part with a short bracket would make a nice icon. Should it be just Meryl? Or should it have meryl.net or Meryl K. Evans?

Fellow Texan Randy Nicholson‘s is classy and I like the colors. I don’t worry too much about the colors because I could change the site’s colors anytime. Concerned about the embellishes and thin lines won’t work well on small items or printing. I like the old-time yet contemporary look. The one thing I would change, if I were to use this, is replace [at] with @. Not like there’s a link on the printed stuff for spambots to attack. The pen on this one could be an icon. I like the feather’s separating meryl and net. Maybe meryl.net and content maven is all that’s needed in a logo.

Daniel Writer — was his last name a sign or something? Furthermore, his web site uses CSS for layouts instead of tables. You go, Daniel! I like the embellishes in his black and white logo. The part with my name and title seems a little plain and the URL being spread out doesn’t work for me. Besides, I like using my middle initial K — Meryl Evans looks lonely without it. K happens to be the first letter in both my middle and maiden names and my middle name is Kay — just like it sounds.

I love what each designer had to say in explaining how they come up with their designs.

If you have one, how did you come up with your logo? What about the colors?

Updated: October 1, 2006

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2 comments

  • Posted by Meryl on September 29th, 2006, 2:25 PM

    I unexpectedly rustled feathers with the reference to design contests. So I researched it and learned something. Another post coming soon. Meantime, enjoy the weekend.

  • Posted by Andy Mason on October 12th, 2006, 6:53 AM

    I paid LogoWorks.com to design my logo for me. It was all done over the internet and was very swift. I gave them a design brief based on a questionnaire you fill in and then I received seven initial concepts from several different designers. I had to choose one of those to take forward and after two rounds of revisions my logo was complete to my satisfaction. The whole process took about 2 weeks and I was very pleased with the results. The designs were available for immediate download and a couple of days later I got a CD-ROM with the logo in .tif, .jpg and .eps formats.

    I blogged about the process and got some hate mail from graphic designers about LogoWorks being the scum of the earth, but my experience was very pleasant. They were prompt, courteous, gave me a wide selection to choose from and a very satisfying result for an economical price. The impression I got about graphic designers from the mail I received and the anti-LogoWorks forums I was pointed at was less favorable.

    The initial concepts I received can be viewed here: http://www.as-if-by-magic.com/initialconcepts.html

    This is the result of the first round of revisions: http://www.as-if-by-magic.com/revisions1.html

    And this is the result of the final round of revisions: http://www.as-if-by-magic.com/revisions2.html

    I selected revision #1 from the final round.

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