last week on this channel i said i never use gradients on my logo designs well i've been
lying to you kind of i don't use gradients anymore and actually i haven't done for many many years
but in today's video let's revisit some of my logo designs going back five seven ten years
and see how bad they really were you're gonna see my mistakes my flaws and also my progression that
i've made over the last decade or so and we're going to work out together why my designs sank
or swam but we're briefly going to look at this first logo and i say logo in quotation marks
because it's not really a logo in my opinion i cannot remember when i made this design and i
can't even remember what the company was and that just shows how unorganized i was back then and
kind of how i didn't understand what i was doing as a designer this is when i would start a logo
design project with maybe the name of the brand or the name of the company and i'd have a vague idea
of the industry they work in and that was it i would feel confident enough to go ahead and design
a logo which is completely wrong yes sometimes you will pull off a magic trick of sorts a miracle and
you will design something really good but without a brief and without knowing what you're doing it's
not a proven method so looking at this logo what do you think is wrong with it and where can you
see things need to be changed well firstly let's change the logo to grayscale because your logo
designs should be as effective or as prominent in grayscale and to be honest the grayscale design
doesn't detract too much away from the original and the color isn't really the issue the issue
i have with this one is obviously the gradients so let's make the logo flat and see if it still works
and as you can see it doesn't look very neat at all it doesn't look memorable and i personally
don't like looking at this design even though it's one of mine and it's many many years ago now
so yeah you should always consider how your logo designs look when they're flat and also in
grayscale and if you do want to use gradients on your designs make sure you send a flat version of
your logo to the client because that logo might be used on metal it might be used on fabrics it
might be used on wood and if they've got a vector gradient file it isn't going to cut the mustard
and next we're going to go deeper into this one but this was a design for a company called
infocrest and yeah i'm cringing myself when i look at my old designs especially this one but
take a look at this design and try and see what things are wrong here from your perspective what
would you change and how would you improve on this design before we go into what's wrong with
it let's try and see what we got right what things did i do correctly now if my memory serves me well
infoquest was a kind of learning or information based website and so blue was a pretty good choice
actually considering the psychology around the color blue and yeah color psychology does play
a big role in logo design and brand design in general i think that's a check we can say that
was a good choice but also the logo type on infograph does look really neat it's kind of
informal yet it's still sophisticated enough to relate back to the brief and the brand and that's
pretty much where the positives end in my opinion let's look at where it went wrong so firstly what
the hell is this thing here looking back at my old designs i've noticed i use this motif
on quite a few of my logos which just shows you how unprofessional and how unknowledgeable i was
this this motif this design asset here kind of relates back to a very formal or very upper class
high sophistication kind of style of brand and it doesn't belong in this kind of caliber of logo in
my opinion you should be trying to refine your designs down to the simplest form while still
adhering to the brief and also the client base slapping random things into your logo just because
you think it looks good is not a good idea also the layout of this logo is pretty weird i mean
it's kind of a awkward pyramid kind of shape and this isn't something people tend to think about
but when you're using this logo on say a business card or a leaflet banner or even a website you
need to be aware of how it's going to look and how it's going to perform in every single situation
and so the layout shape can determine if it's going to work in specific areas of design and
so taking my original design from many many years ago and having to stay with the kind
of concept and the color scheme and everything else what would i do to improve this logo well
firstly i would change up the tagline the strap line to a sans-serif font like i've done here
and then i would increase the ic or i'd probably get rid of it all together actually if i was going
to redesign this completely i wouldn't even use this concept and then also of course i
would remove the gradient and that stupid motif in between the two logotype lines but let's move on
to another hideous logo for my past so here's another blue logo and also here's that stupid
motif once more as you can see i was just slapping this everywhere back in the day and if you are
struggling with your design concepts or your kind of skill level just realize everybody starts at
the beginning you know we just need to perform and progress as we move through our journey of
our graphic design career but first let's look at what i did correctly for the logo type i used an
uppercase sans-serif font which i do think works well however this specific sans-serif font i don't
think is adequate enough and also i think the negative space on the symbol of the m using the
screw is a pretty good concept it's pretty neat and it could go places if it was developed more
one of the biggest drawbacks on this design was the layouts now this is something that many people
really don't think about too much when considering logo design flaws and that is the technical
aspects of the logo we can see that things aren't aligned there's different thicknesses
of the square around the m and it just looks very unneat unprofessional and untidy and so
again using my original concept and just building on that using the same elements provided here are
two different versions of that logo that i think do look a lot better and they're a lot more neat
you can see everything is aligned properly and i've changed up that logo type so there's some
contrast going on and it does come across as more professional and so we've arrived at a
kind of somewhat recent leg that i've worked on and as you can tell this is already a lot
different from the previous logos we've looked at but why do you think this logo works why is
it an efficient logo design firstly technicals it's aligned properly and everything is flush
and spaced out equally this in of itself does allude to a professional design and it will
help the viewer have more peace of mind so to speak subconsciously when looking at your design
and i'm actually going to talk about a few things now that once i started to implement
my logo design projects things began to excel in progression and professionalism one of those is
shape psychology this is something i've spoken about before in this channel and it's hugely
important utilizing shape psychology can tap into people's emotions and their triggers and then thus
you can market the logo and the brand to specific people efficiently and if you use the correct
shape psychology relating to the brief then things just kind of gel together a lot easier kind of
like a starting point to build up the logo from the foundations upwards one of the other really
important things is to remove excess junk you know just refine things down to the simplest form while
still having an effective design an example would be that really silly motif i showed you throughout
the entire video that i used on several designs in my past it doesn't need to be there it's just a
random thing i slapped on there because it looked good or i thought it looked good but it didn't
and finally you need to remember what you're doing you are adding value to someone's business you're
not there to make something that looks good or something that's just you know pretty or look at
my skills in illustrator no you're adding value to a business someone's come to you because they want
to improve their business or they need to market themselves in a more efficient manner so your job
is to solve that problem visually speaking that's all it is so i hope you enjoyed today's video
looking at my design disasters from the past and i hope you learned something as well but if you
do want to learn more click the video on screen and until next time guys design your future today
peace
you