We’re back

Happy New Year 2013!

First day back in the office today (Jan 7th) and we’re just getting back into the swing of things.

Hope you had a prosperous Christmas and hopefully a break from work.

Here’s some of the things we’re doing in 2013

• Brand Review for e-see® to be completed
• e-see app/BrandFM interface overhaul to be completed
• Complete Embedded Brand Guidelines roll-out
• Mobile app roll-out
• Brand DNA roll-out

So good luck and happy branding. Talk soon.

100 WINS! - Our first Centurion

We wanted to make a special mention of Santiago Sadous a Logosauce designer from Buenos Aires in Argentina.

Santi as he’s affectionately known on Logosauce reached the 100 competition win milestone on the 16th December with a winning logo for Plasti Dip Center.

It was neck and neck for a while there with a race on between Santi and Estween.  Santi won the race with a sprint to hold Estween off in last 2 weeks.

Congrats Santi. You were first.

Logosauce is different

With the explosion of high profile crowd-sourcing sites like 99Designs, Design-Crowd, Freelancer, eLance, etc - we wondered a liitle about our relevance.

After all we beat all of these guys to market.

But we’re a small firm in a small home market (NZ). That’s no excuse mind you, but we feel our approach and purpose remains different enough. We’re happy being a niche player.

Our purpose is bringing logo designers and clients together.

We try not to crowdsource anything else beyond the logo. No website projects, no stationery projects, no collateral projects. Just the logo.

That’s what makes us different,  for us the Logo Design is the entree, the starting point of a new relationship between a designer and a client. 

Once you have that relationship, our job is done.

Our hope is that the client will continue to work with the designer on the additional brand collateral, stationery design, website, etc that is typically required following the logo design.

Why we resist extending into other types of design projects?

Our parent company e-see® provides brand management systems for new and established brands. We work with a huge variety of brands and their designers.

Logosauce™ is our way to establish a relationship with brand owners and designers at the point of creation, without competing with designers.

In the end - we hope that our Logosauce clients and designers remember us
(e-see.com) when they’re ready to think about a Brand Management System for their (or their clients) now established brand.

Oh and we really do love logos. :-)

Closed for Christmas

We’ll be closed over Christmas, off on holiday.

Close: 4pm Friday 21 December 2012
Open: 9am Monday 7 January 2013

If you need support or urgent assistance during that period you can contact the helpdesk as usual, on 0800 300 373 or help@e-see.com.

If you need assistance with publishing new data or product photography during that period, please contact us as soon as possible to arrange prior to the Christmas break.

Thank you

It’s almost over, this year of 2012 and we’re looking forward to a break over Christmas, the opportunity to recharge, relax with our families and friends, Christmas crackers, yummy food, sunshine, a good book …and plenty of sleep.

Naturally we couldn’t have made it through the year, without all of our customers, brand users, colleagues, partners, suppliers and supporters.

So thank you.

The Santa Claus™ brand

We asked ourselves, what would Santa’s brand guidelines look like.

We think something like this:-

So there you go. The Santa Claus™ brand is free to use but follow the rules and you should be good to go.  As always, if in doubt check with Santa HQ in the North Pole, who make the final decision about fair and proper use.

Feel free to share these guidelines.

New ebay logo, echoes of the Google, new Microsoft logos

Ebay recently announce a new logo.

The ebay folks or branding agency seem to be drinking the same water as Microsoft and Google. Or this just validation of the idea - the more things change the more they become the same.

What do you think?

Nobody Cares About Your Logo (design)

Guest post by Alex Garden of Netinsites.

“I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.” said Phil Knight when he chose what would become the Nike swoosh.

Carolyn Davidson who was student at Portland State University had originally met Phil Knight in the late 1960s when he was an associate professor. He had overheard her say she couldn’t afford to take an oil painting class. At the time Knight was also co-founder of Blue Ribbon Sports who were distributors for Tiger Shoes and he wanted Davidson to produce some charts and graphs in preparation for a meeting. After further work she was asked to design a logo for the fledging new company in 1971 and produced several options, one them the swoosh.

Davidson was paid $35 originally for the design but in 1983 was rewarded with several hundred Nike shares and a gold swoosh-shaped diamond ring.

The swoosh is now one of the most recognizable logos in modern history, but what part did it play in Nike’s success? The fact that Nike signed a skinny basketballer from North Carolina named Michael Jordan in 1985 helped. The company’s use of celebrity superstar athletes since then such as Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Tiger Woods is far more relevant. Also the fact that Nike is the only company that has won the Cannes Advertising Festival Advertiser of the Year more than once shows that their marketing is also pretty good.

Because the truth is, how you use your logo is important, but what it looks like and what it means is only important to you and your designer.

Did you know or care that the Amazon logo means that they sell everything from A to Z? That the four rings in the Audi logo refer to the original four companies from the Auto-Union Consortium in 1932? Or that the Sun Microsystems logo reads ‘Sun” no matter which way up its read? The Apple logo is beautiful, but although its designer Rob Janoff was aware of the byte/bite pun he designed it like that to “prevent the apple from looking like a cherry tomato.”

In a similar way to the swoosh, the Apple logo is outstanding but is only memorable because of Apple’s incredible success over the last decade. Can anyone remember the NeXT logo created by Paul Rand for Steve Jobs for the outrageous price of $100,000 in 1986? Of course not, the company was bought out by Apple in 1996 and the logo is only remembered because of its price and the fact that Steve Jobs was involved.

In Website design showing an oversized logo of your company will push more important content down the page, so that many visitors won’t see it because it is ‘below the fold’. Super-sizing your logo is a sign of corporate insecurity and can make the overall design look disjointed and discordant. Interesting and fresh content is far more important and attractive to potential customers than your logo or company name. You’ve only got a few seconds to pique a browser’s interest; a pretty graphic doesn’t do it.

Do you really think they will notice that particular shade of green you spent so much time selecting, or that they will spend minutes mulling over the message your designer is trying to invoke?

Design it, use it appropriately and move on to more important things like making your customer service stellar and ensuring that your product line rocks.

Seriously, nobody cares about your logo.

By Alex Garden of NetInsites

We concur. Don’t get us wrong, we love logos and we appreciate great logo design. In fact we run a web service that helps brands find great logo designs. But Alex is right. The logo once established is just a shortcut for meaning.  People view the logo, but see the brand behind it. It’s how you use the logo and how consistently you reproduce it that matters - e-see

Logosauce Update 10Aug12

We’ve deployed some minor updates to Logosauce production this morning for your pleasure.

• Changed the Shortlisted logo view on the Competition page to a new layout. We think this is a simpler, cleaner and easier to understand layout and should encourage clients to short-list more often.
• Added Facebook Like button
• Fixed Twitter count under Twitter button.
• Now showing all a clients competitions on their Profile page
• Properly restrict files uploads to jpg,gif and png.
• Allow comments to be deleted if less than 10mins old.
• Prevent duplicate comments by disabling double click.
• Now when you login you’ll be returned to the page you were attempting to visit.
• Fixed problem where the Artwork Complaint button was not appearing for clients.
• Fixed a problem where deleted profiles were breaking competition pages
• Changed account deletion handling so that a user can reopen a closed account.

Enjoy.

Logosauce designer gets Internship

We love it when Logosauce has a part to play (albeit a small one) in designers advancing their careers.  

Relative newcomer Cousin Mike from Tampa, Florida let me know that he got an internship at a branding agency, partly due to his Logosauce presence. I asked him to elaborate. Here’s what he had to say.

Hi Digger,

Thanks for the feedback on my design, I really appreciate it. Yeah, I received an internship with Walker Brands in their creative department. They are based out of Tampa and have been a branding company for 20 years. I was able to use some of my logo designs from Logosauce to put in my portfolio. It really helped my portfolio become more complete and they really like them. I think it definitely helped me land the internship. So thanks again. Well keep looking out for me im going to keep submitting logos!

Feel free to share on the blog.

Cousin Mike

Thanks for letting us know Mike, and we did.