How Low Can Your Logo?

Sorry for the relative dormancy, but the Pink Insider has been really busy with other Pinkie buisness. This season in particular has been very stressful, but thankfully things appear to be settling down. I am trying to avoid being overdramatic about it, but after the tsunami of the start of the season we are settling into calmer waters now.

Anyway, this doesn't mean I don't do random websurfing and my current hilarious website of the day goes to How Low Can Your Logo. Have a look at the design brief, then look at this logo (and its comments) to truly appreciare how wonderful it really is!

Pink Singers Folder Icon

Do you ever look at your file explorer and wish you had a special folder icon for all your Pink Singers stuff? No? Well I do and it bugged me enough to do something about it! For your pleasure I present the Pink Singers folder icon suitable for use in Vista or Windows 7. The Pink Insider made one for XP a while back and it should be available somewhere still... As for OSX or Linux, would anyone like to buy me a new computer?

The Evolution Of Design

If you've been paying attention to In The Pink(ies) you will notice that there have been a few design tweaks going on across all the sites. The new Pink Insider twitter page gave us the opportunity to make things a little more consistent across the main blog and the YouTube and Vimeo channels. If you visit on a daily basis, you will see the tweaks happening live. Some of these are very minor, while others are quite radical, but overall, if you are only seeing the end product it is hard to see how the design evolves.

In many ways, though, it is the evolution which is much more interesting, particularly if it gives you a chance to see what might have been. Recently, for instance, there was a wonderful article on how the design of the La Cage Aux Folles poster for the Broadway revival has changed. This week I was watching The Art Of The Steal, a tremendous film on the Barnes Foundation. Regardless of the merits of the film, however, what really caught my eye was the film poster, a marvellous blend of turquoise, strong shapes, typography in relief and highlight colours.

But the design was not always this way. Indeed, because the film actually came from Frank Abagnale's book, there are a lot of designs kicking about. All try to focus on slightly different elements of the story, in an attempt to cater to a different market. Take a look and see how much difference choice of colours, typography and layout can make!

Pink Singers Twitter Design

If you've never been to the Pink Singers twitter page, or even if you have but your monitor is less than 1024 pixels wide, you have probably missed the slightly updated image which sits behind our tweets. It is a pic of us performing at Various Voices in May this year, with the updated logo. I thought I'd post it here in all it's glory so you can get an idea of what it looks like. If you are going to visit our twitter page, why not follow us while you're there?

Out Of Africa

It is a shame that I learnt of these rather gorgeous posters for the South African LGFF only through the report that they are being torn down in the streets of Cape Town. I'm doing my bit to virtually post them, but mainly because I really like the designs and want to share them!

Logos: How Low Can You Go?

I've been working on the Various Voices website of late (there seems to be a never ending flow of things to do there!) and one page I have been tweaking is the sponsors page. Basically, the idea is to put all the logos of the current sponsors of Various Voices up together with a hyperlink to each of their websites. Because of design constraints I have had to force each of the logos to fit into a box 100 pixels wide by 100 pixels high, which is really about as low as I can go, and the result is the screenshot you see to the left (click on it for a proper view).

The one thing I noticed is that the Pink Singers logo works marvelously even at this small size. For a semi-amateur logo (although I would never class anything ever created by Dragan as 'amateur') it scales beautifully. Some of the other logos do suffer a bit for having shrunk down, with relatively poor legibility, but the Pinkies logo keeps truckin' on! Indeed, I think it compares favourably with the professional logos of the Southbank Centre and Visit London, and surpasses the Mayor for London logo. Great stuff.

Nanohazard!

As you probably know from my previous posts, I am an armchair critic of design. I really like my signage clean and simple. That's why I really like the Pink Singers logo: it is familiar, but has just the right amount of 'tweakage' to make it unique to us. At the same time, it also scales well and is readily identifiable.

These characteristics generally make the ideal logo, and you can apply them to the on-going competition to produce an international sign for 'nanohazard'. In these dangerous times, most of us have probably seen the 'biohazard' and 'radiation hazard' signs. Here is your chance to vote on a sign which most of us will hopefully never encounter.

Bad Logo Design

They are knocking down the Middlesex Hospital, and all residents of Fitzrovia have been sent an invitation to see the plans for the new building. I had a free moment just after lunch yesterday, so I went down with Beryl, who lives in one of the lower flats. The exhibition itself was interesting, but what caught my eye was the logo of the development company, called Candy & Candy.

What do you see through the peep hole? Candy and even more candy no doubt. In my view it was a very bad design choice. Perhaps it doesn't rank as highly on the all time list of worst possible logos, but I still think it is pretty awful.

What are the worst logos ever? Well, here we have the Arlington Paediatric Center's logo, and the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. These designs are so bad they are almost legendary. In comparison, the Pink Singers logo is a paradigm of elegant understatement. I think it works very well precisely because it is so simple. There is some discussion about a possible update or even replacement, but I will be sorry to see it go as I think it is a strong identity for us.